I felt the truth of what he said, and for a quarter of an hour I remained silent: “Gabriel,” replied I at last, “I have now gone too far to recede, and the plans which I have devised are not for my own advantage, but for the general welfare of the Shoshones and of all the friendly tribes. I hope to live to see them a great nation, and, at all events, it is worth a trial.”
My friend shook his head mournfully; he was not convinced, but he knew the bent of my temper, and was well aware that all he could say would now be useless.
The natural buoyancy of our spirits would not, however, allow us to be grave long; and when the loud shouts of the doctor announced that he had caught a sight of the river, we spurred our horses, and soon rejoined our company. We had by this time issued from the swampy cane-brakes, and were entering a lane between two rich cotton-fields, and at the end of which flowed the Red River; not the beautiful, clear, and transparent stream running upon a rocky and sandy bed, as in the country inhabited by the Comanches and Pawnee Picts, and there termed the Colorado of the West; but a red and muddy, yet rapid stream. We agreed that we should not ferry the river that evening, but seek a farm, and have a feast before parting company. We learned from a negro, that we were in a place called Lost Prairie, and that ten minutes’ ride down the bank of the stream would carry us to Captain Finn’s plantation. We received this news with wild glee, for Finn was a celebrated character, one whose life was so full of strange adventures in the wilderness, that it would fill volumes with hairbreadth encounter and events of thrilling interest.
Captain Finn received us with a cordial welcome, for unbounded hospitality is the invariable characteristic of the older cotton planters. A great traveller himself, he knew the necessities of a travelling life, and, before conducting us to the mansion, he guided us to the stables, where eight intelligent slaves, taking our horses, rubbed them down before our eyes, and gave them a plentiful supply of fodder and a bed of fresh straw.
“That will do till they are cool,” said our kind host; “tonight they will have their grain and water; let us now go to the old woman and see what she can give us for supper.”
A circumstance worthy of remark is, that, in the western states, a husband always calls his wife the old woman, and she calls him the old man, no matter how young the couple may be. I have often heard men of twenty-five sending their slaves upon some errand “to the old woman,” who was not probably more than eighteen years old. A boy of ten years calls his parents in the same way. “How far to Little Rock?” I once asked of a little urchin; “I don’t know,” answered he, “but the old ones will tell you.” A few yards farther I met the “old ones;” they were both young people, not much more than twenty.
In Mrs Finn we found a stout and plump farmer’s wife, but she was a lady in her manners. Born in the wilderness, the daughter of one bold pioneer and married to another, she had never seen anything but woods, cane-brakes, cotton, and negroes, and yet, in her kindness and hospitality, she displayed a refinement of feeling and good breeding. She was daughter of the celebrated Daniel Boone, a name which has acquired a reputation even in Europe. She immediately ransacked her pantry, her hen-roost, and garden, and when we returned from the cotton-mill, to which our host, in his farmer’s pride, had conducted us. (We found upon) an immense table, a meal which would have satisfied fifty of those voracious Bostonians whom we had met with the day before at the table-d’hôte.
Well do I recollect her, as she stood before us on that glorious evening, her features beaming with pleasure, as she witnessed the rapidity with which we emptied our plates. How happy she would look when we praised her chickens, her honey, and her coffee; and then she would carve and cut, fill again our cups, and press upon us all the delicacies of the Far West borders, delicacies unknown in the old countries; such as fried beaver-tail, smoked tongue of the buffalo-calf, and (the gourmand’s dish par excellence) the Louisiana gombo. Her coffee, too, was superb, as she was one of the few upon the continent of America who knew how to prepare it.
After our supper, the captain conducted us under the piazza attached to the building, where we found eight hammocks suspended, as white as snow. There our host disinterred from a large bucket of ice several bottles of Madeira, which we sipped with great delight; the more so as, for our cane pipes and cheap Cavendish, Finn substituted a box of genuine Havannah cazadores. After our fatigues and starvation, it was more than comfortable—it was delightful. The doctor vowed he would become a planter, the parson asked if there were any widows in the neighbourhood, and the lawyers inquired if the planters of the vicinity were any way litigious. By the bye, I have observed that Captain Finn was a celebrated character. As we warmed with the Madère frappé à glace, we pressed him to relate some of his wild adventures, with which request he readily complied; for he loved to rehearse his former exploits, and it was not always that he could narrate them to so numerous an assembly. As the style he employed could only be understood by individuals who have rambled upon the borders of the Far West, I will relate the little I remember in my own way, though I am conscious that the narrative must lose much when told by any one but Finn himself.
When quite an infant, he had been taken by the Indians and carried into the fastnesses of the West Virginian forests; there he had been brought up till he was sixteen years old, when, during an Indian war, he was recaptured by a party of white men. Who were his parents, he could never discover, and a kind Quaker took him into his house, gave him his name, and treated him as his own child, sending him first to school, and then to the Philadelphia college. The young man, however, was little fit for the restrictions of a university; he would often escape and wander for days in the forests, until hunger would bring him home again. At last, he returned to his adopted father, who was now satisfied that his thoughts were in the wilderness, and that, in the bustle of a large city and restraint of civilised life, he would not live, but linger on till he drooped and died.