So long have I been recruiting, and enjoying the society of friends in this town, that the navigation of the river has suddenly closed, being entirely frozen over; and the earth’s surface covered with eighteen inches of drifting snow, which has driven me to the only means, and I start in a day or two, with a tough little pony and a packhorse, to trudge through the snow drifts from this to New Madrid, and perhaps further; a distance of three or four hundred miles to the South—where I must venture to meet a warmer climate—the river open, and steamers running, to waft me to the Gulf of Mexico. Of the fate or success that waits me, or of the incidents of that travel, as they have not transpired, I can as yet say nothing; and I close my book for further time and future entries.
[3] Some year or two after writing the above, I saw the announcement of the death of this veteran, whose life has been one of faithful service to his country, and, at the same time, at strictest fidelity as the guardian and friend of the red men.
LETTER—No. 36.
PENSACOLA, WEST FLORIDA.
From my long silence of late, you will no doubt have deemed me out of the civil and perhaps out of the whole world.
I have, to be sure, been a great deal of the time out of the limits of one and, at times, nearly out of the other. Yet I am living, and hold in my possession a number of epistles which passing events had dictated, but which I neglected to transmit at the proper season. In my headlong transit through the Southern tribes of Indians, I have “popped out” of the woods upon this glowing land, and I cannot forego the pleasure of letting you into a few of the secrets of this delightful place.
“Flos—floris,” &c. every body knows the meaning of; and Florida, in Spanish, is a country of flowers.—Perdido is perdition, and Rio Perdido, River of Perdition. Looking down its perpendicular banks into its black water, its depth would seem to be endless, and the doom of the unwary to be gloomy in the extreme. Step not accidentally or wilfully over its fatal brink, and Nature’s opposite extreme is spread about you. You are literally in the land of the “cypress and myrtle”—where the ever-green live oak and lofty magnolia dress the forest in a perpetual mantle of green.
The sudden transition from the ice-bound regions of the North to this mild climate, in the midst of winter, is one of peculiar pleasure. At a half-way of the distance, one’s cloak is thrown aside; and arrived on the ever-verdant borders of Florida, the bosom is opened and bared to the soft breeze from the ocean’s wave, and the congenial warmth of a summer’s sun.
Such is the face of Nature here in the rude month of February; green peas are served on the table—other garden vegetables in great perfection, and garden flowers, as well as wild, giving their full and sweetest perfume to the winds.