At three, P. M. having cast off from Mr. Wells’s boats, we rowed into the mouth of Bayau Pierre, up which we advanced a quarter of a mile, and then fastened to a willow, in the middle of the river.
The contrast between our situation now, and while in the Mississippi was very striking. From a noble, majestick, stream, with a rapid current, meandering past points, islands, plantations and wildernesses, and bearing the produce of the inland states, in innumerable craft of every kind, to New Orleans and the ocean. To find myself suddenly in a deep, dark, narrow stagnate piece of water, surrounded closely by a forest of tall willows, poplars, and other demi aquatick trees, and not a sound to be heard, except the monotonous croakings of frogs, interrupted occasionally by the bull like roaring of an alligator—the closeness of the woods excluding every current of air, and hosts of musquitoes attacking one in every {284} quarter. The tout ensemble was so gloomy, that a British seaman, one of Wells’s boat’s crew, who had volunteered to assist in getting our boat into the bayau, looking round, exclaimed emphatically—
“And is it here you stop, and is this the country to which so many poor ignorant devils remove, to make their fortunes?—D——n my precious eyes if I would not rather be at allowance of a mouldy biscuit a day, in any part of Old England, or even New York, Pennsylvania, or Maryland, than I would be obliged to live in such a country as this two years, to own the finest cotton plantation, and the greatest gang of negroes in the territory.”
FOOTNOTES:
[197] Walnut Hills is the site of Vicksburg, which was laid out as a town in 1811. This territory, between 31° and 32° 30′ north latitude, was in contention between Spain and the United States from the treaty of 1783 until that known as Pinckney’s treaty in 1795, when Spain consented to recognize the right of the United States to the disputed strip. Meanwhile, the local authorities refused to surrender the forts, and it was not until 1798 that a detachment of United States troops took possession of Fort Nogales (built on this site in 1789), and changed its name to Fort McHenry, in honor of the then secretary of war. This territory was part of the grant of the Yazoo Company, whose frauds caused so much contention over titles in the district. See Haskins, “The Yazoo Land Companies,” in American Historical Association Papers (New York, 1891), v, pp. 395-437.—Ed.
[198] This settlement on the Big Black was made by Connecticut emigrants upon a grant to General Phineas Lyman (1775), when the region was part of West Florida. Several journals detailing the hardships of the colonists are extant, notably that of Captain Matthew Phelps.—Ed.
CHAPTER XLIX
Commence my tour by land—Bruinsbury—A primitive clergyman—Bayau Pierre swamp—Hilly country—Plantations—Thunder storm—A benevolent shoemaker—Norris’s—Cole’s creek—A consequential landlord—Greenville—Union town—A travelling painter.
On Monday 22d August, I set out from Bruinsbury on horseback, for the purpose of visiting the most improved parts of the Mississippi territory, and the adjacent part of the Spanish province of West Florida.
Bruinsbury was the property of judge Bruin,[199] until lately, that he sold it together with a claim to about three thousand acres of the surrounding land to Messrs. Evans and Overaker of Natchez, reserving to himself his house, offices and garden.