The island pirate, a tale of the Mississippi

by Mayne Reid

I had long since left behind me the region of turnpikes, and my route lay over roads where the hoof struck only on the softly-turfed surface of the earth. Now and then it coincided with the old "Natchez trace"—that once much-traveled highway, on which Murrell had committed many of his murders.

In due time—and with only those slight mischances which form rather the charms of travel—I reached the Mississippi plantation, and presented my letters of introduction to the proprietor. I was received with all the warmth of Western hospitality. Indeed, by my new host, Henry Woodley, credentials would scarce have been called for. Sufficient for him to know that I was fond of hunting, to have insured me a warm reception. With the addition of such introduction as I carried, it was only made the warmer; and I was received with as much zeal as if, instead of that pretty epistle from his sister, I had brought one from the old squire containing a check for a thousand dollars.

I was not long upon the plantation of Mr. Henry Woodley, till I could tell that this last would not have been unwelcome. Here every thing was different from the old homestead in Tennessee.

Instead of a handsome "frame house," well filled with furniture that approached the fashionable, I was introduced to a dwelling of a less pretentious kind. It was a large log-cabin, comfortable enough, but with no claim to architectural style. It stood inside of an inclosure of rude rail fence, overshadowed by trees and surrounded by a shrubbery of magnolias, osage orange, and other fair forms of vegetation, just as the forest had furnished them. At the back were the cooking quarters, standing apart; beyond them the stabling, and to one side a group of negro-cabins at some distance from the dwelling. Despite the primitive rudeness of the place, there was that picturesqueness that is pleasing to the eye.

There were, withal, sufficient signs to insure comfort, and a kennel close by containing a score of stag-hounds—some of them showing scars that could only have been made by the claws of bear or panther—promised something more—that sport of which their proprietor was so passionately fond—the grand chase.

It was for this, in truth, that Henry Woodley had selected his new home; for this consented, year after year, to endure the summer heats, and breathe the miasma of the Mississippi swamps—not to make a fortune in the culture of cotton and tobacco. His corn-growing was intended only to feed the horses in his stable, as well as the hogs required for the sustenance of the negro-quarters and the kennel.

Henry Woodley was not the only man I had met who, under the pretense of being a planter, passed three-fourths of his time in the chase—his farming being only a pleasant fiction—a pretext, to escape from the charge—even the self-accusation—of having nothing to do! Hundreds of such characters there are in the Mississippi valley.

Inside, as without, you had evidence of the house being a true hunter's home. In the vast open porch, with its adjoining gallery, you were surrounded by trophies of the chase—horns, skins and claws, suspended alongside a miscellaneous assortment of guns and riding-gear, nets, traps, and fishing-tackle.

Soon after my arrival, my host commenced initiating me into the ways of a Southern sportsman's life; and ere long I was introduced to the different kinds of chase practiced upon the Mississippi.

In less than a month I had collected, on my own account, most of those trophies that fall to the lot of a Mississippi hunter. Among them were skins of the black bear, the red puma or "painter" of the backwoodsmen, the spotted lynx—better known by the name of "wild-cat"—wolves, black and gray, with raccoons, opossums, skunks, swamp rabbits, and other four-footed "varmints." In my collection were the antlers of the Virginia stag, the scaly skin of the alligator, as also the singular gar-fish, or shark of the South-western waters.