Transcriber’s Notes

Inconsistent hyphenation, capitalization, and spelling in the original document have been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Quotes in dialect were not corrected.

The following are possible errors, but retained:

• but I havn’t got through with you yet. ([page 10])
• venemous water-snakes, ([page 24])
• Barbecued rabits. ([page 57])
• Rasins ([page 57])
• prehaps you’ll never see a stage again; ([page 66])
• [Page 76 and 77] (Numerous possible spelling errors).
• Your equaility is acknowledged ([page 143])
• As to the moralty of this question ([page 234])
• lagunes, and jungles ([page 257])
• a caldron which stood over the fire ([page 316])
• the moral physican ([page 344])

Download Volume 1 at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/72676.

JOURNEYS AND EXPLORATIONS
IN
THE COTTON KINGDOM OF AMERICA.

THE

COTTON KINGDOM:

A TRAVELLER’S OBSERVATIONS ON COTTON AND SLAVERY IN THE AMERICAN SLAVE STATES.

BASED UPON THREE FORMER VOLUMES OF JOURNEYS AND INVESTIGATIONS BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

BY

FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED.

IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. II.

NEW YORK:
PUBLISHED BY MASON BROTHERS,
5 and 7 MERCER STREET.
LONDON: SAMPSON LOW, SON & CO., 47 LUDGATE HILL.
1861.

Entered, according to the Act of Congress, in the year 1861, by
MASON BROTHERS,
In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern
District of New York.

PRINTED BY
C. A. Alvord,
15 Vandewater-st.

CONTENTS.

COTTON AND SLAVERY.

CHAPTER I.
SOUTH-WESTERN LOUISIANA AND EASTERN TEXAS.

Nacogdoches.—In this town of 500 inhabitants, we found there was no flour. At San Augustine we had inquired in vain at all the stores for refined sugar. Not satisfied with some blankets that were shown us, we were politely recommended by the shopkeeper to try other stores. At each of the other stores we were told they had none: the only blankets in town we should find at ——’s, naming the one we had just quitted. The same thing occurred with several other articles.

Houston County.—This day’s ride and the next were through a very poor country, clay or sand soil, bearing short oaks and black-jack. We passed one small meadow, or prairie, covered with coarse grass. Deserted plantations appeared again in greater numbers than the occupied. One farm, near which we stopped, was worked by eight field hands. The crop had been fifty bales; small, owing to a dry season. The corn had been exceedingly poor. The hands, we noticed, came in from the fields after eight o’clock.

The deserted houses, B. said, were built before the date of Texan Independence. After Annexation the owners had moved on to better lands in the West. One house he pointed out as having been the residence of one of a band of pirates who occupied the country thirty or forty years ago. They had all been gradually killed.

During the day we met two men on horseback, one upon wheels, and passed one emigrant family. This was all the motion upon the principal road of the district.

The second day’s camp was a few miles beyond the town of Crockett, the shire-town of Houston County. Not being able to find corn for our horses, we returned to the village for it.

We obtained what we wanted for a day’s rest, which we proposed for Sunday, the following day, and loaded it into our emptied hampers. We then looked about the town for current provisions for ourselves. We were rejoiced to find a German baker, but damped by finding he had only molasses-cakes and candies for sale. There was no flour in the town, except the little of which he made his cakes. He was from Hamburgh, and though he found a tolerable sale, to emigrants principally, he was very tired of Crockett, and intended to move to San Antonio among his countrymen. He offered us coffee, and said he had had beer, but on Christmas-day a mass of people called on him; he had “treated” them all, and they had finished his supply.

We inquired at seven stores, and at the two inns for butter, flour, or wheat-bread, and fresh meat. There was none in town. One innkeeper offered us salt beef, the only meat, except pork, in town. At the stores we found crackers, worth in New York 6 cents a pound, sold here at 20 cents; poor raisins, 30 cents; Manilla rope, half-inch, 30 cents a pound. When butter was to be had it came in firkins from New York, although an excellent grazing country is near the town.

Trinity Bottom.—On landing on the west side of the Trinity, we entered a rich bottom, even in winter, of an almost tropical aspect. The road had been cut through a cane-brake, itself a sort of Brobdignag grass. Immense trees, of a great variety of kinds, interlaced their branches and reeled with their own rank growth. Many vines, especially huge grape-vines, ran hanging from tree to tree, adding to the luxuriant confusion. Spanish moss clung thick everywhere, supplying the shadows of a winter foliage.

These bottom lands bordering the Trinity are among the richest of rich Texas. They are not considered equal, in degree of fatness, to some parts of the Brazos, Colorado, and Guadaloupe bottoms, but are thought to have compensation in reliability for steady cropping.

We made our camp on the edge of the bottom, and for safety against our dirty persecutors, the hogs, pitched our tent within a large hog-yard, putting up the bars to exclude them. The trees within had been sparingly cut, and we easily found tent-poles and fuel at hand.

The plantation on which we were thus intruding had just been sold, we learned, at two dollars per acre. There were seven hundred acres, and the buildings, with a new gin-house, worth nearly one thousand dollars, were included in the price. With the land were sold eight prime field-hands. A quarter of the land was probably subject to overflow, and the limits extended over some unproductive upland.

When field-hands are sold in this way with the land, the family servants, who have usually been selected from the field-hands, must be detached to follow the fortunes of the seller. When, on the other hand, the land is sold simply, the whole body of slaves move away, leaving frequently wives and children on neighbouring plantations. Such a cause of separation must be exceedingly common among the restless, almost nomadic, small proprietors of the South.

But the very word “sale,” applied to a slave, implies this cruelty, leaving, of course, the creature’s whole happiness to his owner’s discretion and humanity.

As if to give the lie to our reflections, however, the rascals here appeared to be particularly jolly, perhaps adopting Mark Tapley’s good principles. They were astir half the night, talking, joking, and singing loud and merrily.

This plantation had made this year seven bales to the hand. The water for the house, we noticed, was brought upon heads a quarter of a mile, from a rain-pool, in which an old negress was washing.

At an old Settler’s.—The room was fourteen feet square, with battens of split boards tacked on between the broader openings of the logs. Above, it was open to the rafters, and in many places the sky could be seen between the shingles of the roof. A rough board box, three feet square, with a shelf in it, contained the crockery-ware of the establishment; another similar box held the store of meal, coffee, sugar, and salt; a log crib at the horse-pen held the corn, from which the meal was daily ground, and a log smoke or store-house contained the store of pork. A canopy-bed filled one quarter of the room; a cradle, four chairs seated with untanned deer-hide, a table, a skillet or bake-kettle, a coffee-kettle, a frying-pan, and a rifle laid across two wooden pegs on the chimney, with a string of patches, powder-horn, pouch, and hunting-knife, completed the furniture of the house. We all sat with hats and overcoats on, and the woman cooked in bonnet and shawl. As I sat in the chimney-corner I could put both my hands out, one laid on the other, between the stones of the fire-place and the logs of the wall.

A pallet of quilts and blankets was spread for us in the lean-to, just between the two doors. We slept in all our clothes, including overcoats, hats, and boots, and covered entirely with blankets. At seven in the morning, when we threw them off, the mercury in the thermometer in our saddle-bags, which we had used for a pillow, stood at 25° Fahrenheit.

We contrived to make cloaks and hoods from our blankets, and after going through with the fry, coffee and pone again, and paying one dollar each for the entertainment of ourselves and horses, we continued our journey.

Caldwell.—Late in the same evening we reached a hamlet, the “seat of justice” of Burleson County. We were obliged to leave our horses in a stable, made up of a roof, in which was a loft for the storage of provender, set upon posts, without side-boarding, so that the norther met with no obstruction. It was filled with horses, and ours alone were blanketed for the night. The mangers were very shallow and narrow, and as the corn was fed on the cob, a considerable proportion of it was thrown out by the horses in their efforts to detach the edible portion. With laudable economy, our landlord had twenty-five or thirty pigs running at large in the stable, to prevent this overflow from being wasted.

The “hotel” was an unusually large and fine one; the principal room had glass windows. Several panes of these were, however, broken, and the outside door could not be closed from without; and when closed, was generally pried open with a pocket-knife by those who wished to go out. A great part of the time it was left open. Supper was served in another room, in which there was no fire, and the outside door was left open for the convenience of the servants in passing to and from the kitchen, which, as usual here at large houses, was in a detached building. Supper was, however, eaten with such rapidity that nothing had time to freeze on the table.

There were six Texans, planters and herdsmen, who had made harbour at the inn for the norther, two German shopkeepers and a young lawyer, who were boarders, besides our party of three, who had to be seated before the fire. We kept coats and hats on, and gained as much warmth, from the friendly manner in which we drew together, as possible. After ascertaining, by a not at all impertinent or inconsiderate method of inquiry, where we were from, which way we were going, what we thought of the country, what we thought of the weather, and what were the capacities and the cost of our fire-arms, we were considered as initiated members of the crowd, and “the conversation became general.”

The matter of most interest came up in this wise: “The man made a white boy, fourteen or fifteen years old, get up and go out in the norther for wood, when there was a great, strong nigger fellow lying on the floor doing nothing. God! I had an appetite to give him a hundred, right there.”

“Why, you wouldn’t go out into the norther yourself, would you, if you were not obliged to?” inquired one, laughingly.

“I wouldn’t have a nigger in my house that I was afraid to set to work, at anything I wanted him to do, at any time. They’d hired him out to go to a new place next Thursday, and they were afraid if they didn’t treat him well, he’d run away. If I couldn’t break a nigger of running away, I wouldn’t have him any how.”

“I can tell you how you can break a nigger of running away, certain,” said another. “There was an old fellow I used to know in Georgia, that always cured his so. If a nigger ran away, when he caught him, he would bind his knee over a log, and fasten him so he couldn’t stir; then he’d take a pair of pincers and pull one of his toe-nails out by the roots; and tell him that if he ever run away again, he would pull out two of them, and if he run away again after that, he told them he’d pull out four of them, and so on, doubling each time. He never had to do it more than twice—it always cured them.”

One of the company then said that he was at the present time in pursuit of a negro. He had bought him of a relative in Mississippi, and had been told that he was a great runaway. He had, in fact, run away from his relative three times, and always when they caught him he was trying to get back to Illinois;[1] that was the reason he sold him. “He offered him to me cheap,” he continued, “and I bought him because he was a first-rate nigger, and I thought perhaps I could break him of running away by bringing him down to this new country. I expect he’s making for Mexico now. I am a-most sure I saw his tracks on the road about twelve miles back, where he was a-coming on this way. Night before last I engaged with a man who’s got some first-rate nigger dogs to meet me here to-night; but I suppose the cold keeps him back.” He then asked us to look out for him as we went on west, and gave us a minute description of him that we might recognize him. He was “a real black nigger,” and carried off a double-barrelled gun with him. Another man, who was going on by another road westward, offered to look for him that way, and to advertise him. Would he be likely to defend himself with the gun if he should try to secure him? he asked. The owner said he had no doubt he would. He was as humble a nigger when he was at work as ever he had seen; but he was a mighty resolute nigger—there was no man had more resolution. “Couldn’t I induce him to let me take the gun by pretending I wanted to look at it, or something? I’d talk to him simple; make as if I was a stranger, and ask him about the road, and so on, and finally ask him what he had got for a gun, and to let me look at it.” The owner didn’t believe he’d let go of the gun; he was a “nigger of sense—as much sense as a white man; he was not one of your kinkey-headed niggers.” The chances of catching him were discussed. Some thought they were good, and some that the owner might almost as well give it up, he’d got such a start. It was three hundred miles to the Mexican frontier, and he’d have to make fires to cook the game he would kill, and could travel only at night; but then every nigger or Mexican he could find would help him, and if he had so much sense, he’d manage to find out his way pretty straight, and yet not have white folks see him.

We slept in a large upper room, in a company of five, with a broken window at the head of our bed, and another at our side, offering a short cut to the norther across our heads.

We were greatly amused to see one of our bed-room companions gravely spit in the candle before jumping into bed, explaining to some one who made a remark, that he always did so, it gave him time to see what he was about before it went out.

The next morning the ground was covered with sleet, and the gale still continued (a pretty steady close-reefing breeze) during the day.

We wished to have a horse shod. The blacksmith, who was a white man, we found in his shop, cleaning a fowling-piece. It was too d——d cold to work, he said, and he was going to shoot some geese; he, at length, at our urgent request, consented to earn a dollar; but, after getting on his apron, he found that we had lost a shoe, and took it off again, refusing to make a shoe while this d——d norther lasted, for any man. As he had no shoes ready made, he absolutely turned us out of the shop, and obliged us to go seventy-five miles further, a great part of the way over a pebbly road, by which the beast lost three shoes before he could be shod.

This respect for the north wind is by no means singular here. The publication of the week’s newspaper in Bastrop was interrupted by the norther, the editor mentioning, as a sufficient reason for the irregularity, the fact that his printing-office was in the north part of the house.

Austin.—Before leaving Eastern Texas behind us, I must add a random note or two, the dates of which it would have been uncivil to indicate.

We stopped one night at the house of a planter, now twenty years settled in Eastern Texas. He was a man of some education and natural intelligence, and had, he told us, an income, from the labour of his slaves, of some $4,000. His residence was one of the largest houses we had seen in Texas. It had a second story, two wings and a long gallery. Its windows had been once glazed, but now, out of eighty panes that originally filled the lower windows, thirty only remained unbroken. Not a door in the house had been ever furnished with a latch or even a string; when they were closed, it was necessary to claw or to ask some one inside to push open. (Yet we happened to hear a neighbour expressing serious admiration of the way these doors fitted.) The furniture was of the rudest description.

One of the family had just had a hæmorrhage of the lungs; while we were at supper, this person sat between the big fireplace and an open outside door, having a window, too, at his side, in which only three panes remained. A norther was blowing, and ice forming upon the gallery outside. Next day at breakfast, the invalid was unable to appear on account of a “bad turn.”

On our supper-table was nothing else than the eternal fry, pone and coffee. Butter, of dreadful odour, was here added by exception. Wheat flour they never used. It was “too much trouble.”

We were waited upon by two negro girls, dressed in short-waisted, twilled-cotton gowns, once white, now looking as if they had been worn by chimney-sweeps. The water for the family was brought in tubs upon the heads of these two girls, from a creek, a quarter of a mile distant, this occupation filling nearly all their time.

This gentleman had thirty or forty negroes, and two legitimate sons. One was an idle young man. The other was, at eight years old, a swearing, tobacco-chewing bully and ruffian. We heard him whipping a puppy behind the house, and swearing between the blows, his father and mother being at hand. His language and tone was an evident imitation of his father’s mode of dealing with his slaves.

“I’ve got an account to settle with you; I’ve let you go about long enough; I’ll teach you who’s your master; there, go now, God damn you, but I havn’t got through with you yet.”

“You stop that cursing,” said his father, at length, “it isn’t right for little boys to curse.”

“What do you do when you get mad?” replied the boy; “reckon you cuss some; so now you’d better shut up.”

In the whole journey through Eastern Texas, we did not see one of the inhabitants look into a newspaper or a book, although we spent days in houses where men were lounging about the fire without occupation. One evening I took up a paper which had been lying unopened upon the table of the inn where we were staying, and smiled to see how painfully news items dribbled into the Texas country papers, the loss of the tug-boat “Ajax,” which occurred before we left New York, being here just given as the loss of the “splendid steamer Ocax.”

A man who sat near said—

“Reckon you’ve read a good deal, hain’t you?”

“Oh, yes; why?”

“Reckon’d you had.”

“Why?”

“You look as though you liked to read. Well, it’s a good thing. S’pose you take a pleasure in reading, don’t you?”

“That depends, of course, on what I have to read. I suppose everybody likes to read when they find anything interesting to them, don’t they?”

“No; it’s damn tiresome to some folks, I reckon, any how, ’less you’ve got the habit of it. Well, it’s a good thing; you can pass away your time so.”

The sort of interest taken in foreign affairs is well enough illustrated by the views of a gentleman of property in Eastern Texas, who was sitting with us one night, “spitting in the fire,” and talking about cotton. Bad luck he had had—only four bales to the hand; couldn’t account for it—bad luck; and next year he didn’t reckon nothing else but that there would be a general war in Europe, and then he’d be in a pretty fix, with cotton down to four cents a pound. Curse those Turks! If he thought there would be a general war, he would take every d——d nigger he’d got, right down to New Orleans, and sell them for what they’d bring. They’d never be so high again as they were now, and if there should come a general war they wouldn’t be worth half as much next year. There always were infernal rascals somewhere in the world trying to prevent an honest man from getting a living. Oh, if they got to fighting, he hoped they’d eat each other up. They just ought to be, all of them—Turks, and Russians, and Prussians, and Dutchmen, and Frenchmen—just be put in a bag together, and slung into hell. That’s what he’d do with them.

Remarking, one day, at the house of a woman who was brought up at the North, that there was much more comfort at her house than any we had previously stopped at, she told us that the only reason the people didn’t have any comfort here was, that they wouldn’t take any trouble to get anything. Anything that their negroes could make they would eat; but they would take no pains to instruct them, or to get anything that didn’t grow on the plantation. A neighbour of hers owned fifty cows, she supposed, but very rarely had any milk and scarcely ever any butter, simply because his people were too lazy to milk or churn, and he wouldn’t take the trouble to make them.

This woman entirely sustained the assertion that Northern people, when they come to the South, have less feeling for the negroes than Southerners themselves usually have. We asked her (she lived in a village) whether she hired or owned her servants. They owned them all, she said. When they first came to Texas they hired servants, but it was very troublesome; they would take no interest in anything; and she couldn’t get along with them. Then very often their owners, on some pretext (ill-treatment, perhaps), would take them away. Then they bought negroes. It was very expensive: a good negro girl cost seven or eight hundred dollars, and that, we must know, was a great deal of money to be laid out in a thing that might lie right down the next day and die. They were not much better either than the hired servants.

Folks up North talked about how badly the negroes were treated; she wished they could see how much work her girls did. She had four of them, and she knew they didn’t do half so much work as one good Dutch girl such as she used to have at the North. Oh! the negroes were the laziest things in creation; there was no knowing how much trouble they gave to look after them. Up to the North, if a girl went out into the garden for anything, when she came back she would clean her feet, but these nigger girls will stump right in and track mud all over the house. What do they care? They’d just as lief clean the mud after themselves as anything else—their time isn’t any value to themselves. What do they care for the trouble it gives you? Not a bit. And you may scold ’em and whip ’em—you never can break ’em into better habits.

I asked what were servants’ wages when they were hired out to do housework? They were paid seven or eight dollars a month; sometimes ten. She didn’t use to pay her girl at the North but four dollars, and she knew she would do more work than any six of the niggers, and not give half so much trouble as one. But you couldn’t get any other help here but niggers. Northern folks talk about abolishing slavery, but there wouldn’t be any use in that; that would be ridiculous, unless you could some way get rid of the niggers. Why, they’d murder us all in our beds—that’s what they’d do. Why, over to Fannin, there was a negro woman that killed her mistress with an axe, and her two little ones. The people just flocked together, and hung her right up on the spot; they ought to have piled some wood round her, and burned her to death; that would have been a good lesson to the rest. We afterwards heard her scolding one of her girls, the girl made some exculpatory reply, and getting the best of the argument, the mistress angrily told her if she said another word she would have two hundred lashes given her. She came in and remarked that if she hadn’t felt so nervous she would have given that girl a good whipping herself; these niggers are so saucy, it’s very trying to one who has to take care of them.

Servants are, it is true, “a trial,” in all lands, ages, and nations. But note the fatal reason this woman frankly gives for the inevitable delinquencies of slave-servants, “Their time isn’t any value to themselves!”

The women of Eastern Texas seemed to us, in general, far superior to their lords. They have, at least, the tender hearts and some of the gentle delicacy that your “true Texan” lacks, whether mistresses of slaves, or only of their own frying-pan. They are overworked, however, as soon as married, and care gives them thin faces, sallow complexions, and expressions either sad or sour.

Another night we spent at the house of a man who came here, when a boy, from the North. His father was a mechanic, and had emigrated to Texas just before the war of Independence. He joined the army, and his son had been brought up—rather had grown up—Southern fashion, with no training to regular industry. He had learned no trade. What need? His father received some thousand acres of land in payment of his services. The son earned some money by driving a team; bought some cattle, took a wife, and a house, and now had been settled six years, with a young family. He had nothing to do but look after his cattle, go to the nearest town and buy meal and coffee occasionally, and sell a few oxen when the bill was sent in. His house was more comfortless than nine-tenths of the stables of the North. There were several windows, some of which were boarded over, some had wooden shutters, and some were entirely open. There was not a pane of glass. The doors were closed with difficulty. We could see the stars, as we lay in bed, through the openings of the roof; and on all sides, in the walls of the room, one’s arm might be thrust out. Notwithstanding, that night the mercury fell below 25° of our Fahrenheit thermometer. There was the standard food and beverage, placed before us night and morning. We asked if there was much game near him? There were a great many deer. He saw them every day. Did he shoot many? He never shot any; ’twas too much trouble. When he wanted “fresh,” ’twas easier to go out and stick a hog (the very words he used). He had just corn enough to give our horses one feed—there was none left for the morning. His own horses could get along through the winter on the prairie. He made pets of his children, but was cross and unjust to his wife, who might have been pretty, and was affectionate. He was without care—thoughtless, content, with an unoccupied mind. He took no newspaper—he read nothing. There was, indeed, a pile of old books which his father had brought from the North, but they seemed to be all of the Tract Society sort, and the dust had been undisturbed upon them, it might have been, for many years.

Manchac Spring.—We found a plantation that would have done no discredit to Virginia. The house was large and well constructed, standing in a thick grove, separated from the prairie by a strong worm-fence. Adjacent, within, was the spring, which deserved its prominence of mention upon the maps. It had been tastefully grottoed with heavy limestone rocks, now water-stained and mossy, and the pure stream came gurgling up, in impetuous gallons, to pour itself in a bright current out upon the prairie. The fountains of Italy were what came to mind, and “Fontana de Manciocco” would have secured a more natural name.

Everything about the house was orderly and neat. The proprietor came out to receive us, and issued orders about the horses, which we felt, from their quiet tone, would be obeyed without our supervision. When we were ushered into a snug supper-room and found a clean table set with wheat-bread, ham, tea, and preserved fruits, waited on by tidy and ready girls, we could scarce think we had not got beyond the bounds of Texas. We were, in fact, quit, for some time to come, of the lazy poverty of Eastern Texas.

Lower Guadaloupe.—Not finding a suitable camping place, we stumbled, after dark, into a large plantation upon the river bottom.

The irruption of our train within the plantation fences caused a furious commotion among the dogs and little negroes, and it was with no little difficulty we could explain to the planter, who appeared with a candle, which was instantly blown out upon the porch, our peaceable intentions. Finally, after a general striking out of Fanny’s heels and the master’s boots, aided by the throwing of our loose lariats into the confused crowd, the growling and chattering circle about us was sufficiently enlarged and subdued for us to obtain a hearing, and we were hospitably received.

“Ho, Sam! You Tom, here! Call your missus. Suke! if you don’t stop that infernal noise I’ll have you drowned! Here, Bill! Josh! some of you! why don’t you help the gentleman? Bring a lantern here! Packed, are you, sir. Hold on, you there; leave the gun alone. Now, clear out with you, you little devils, every one of you! Is there no one in the house? St! after ’em, Tiger! Can’t any of you find a lantern? Where’s Bill, to take these horses? What are you doing there? I tell you to be off, now, every one of you! Tom! take a rail and keep ’em off there!”

In the midst of the noise we go through the familiar motions, and land our saddles and hampers upon the gallery, then follow what appears to be the headmost negro to the stable, and give him a hint to look well out for the horses.

This is our first reintroduction to negro servants after our German experiences, and the contrast is most striking and disagreeable. Here were thirty or forty slaves, but not an order could be executed without more reiteration, and threats, and oaths, and greater trouble to the master and mistress, than would be needed to get a squadron under way. We heard the master threaten his negroes with flogging, at least six times, before we went to bed. In the night a heavy rain came up, and he rose, on hearing it, to arrange the cistern spout, cursing again his infernal niggers, who had turned it off for some convenience of their own. In the morning, we heard the mistress scolding her girls for having left articles outside which had been spoiled by the wet, after repeated orders to bring them in. On visiting the stables we found the door fastened by a board leaned against it.

All the animals were loose, except the mule, which I had fastened myself. The rope attached to my saddle was stolen, and a shorter one substituted for it, when I mentioned the fact, by which I was deceived, until we were too far off to return. The master, seeing the horses had yet had no fodder, called to a boy to get some for them, then, countermanding his order, told the boy to call some one else, and go himself to drive the cows out of the garden. Then, to another boy, he said, “Go and pull two or three bundles of fodder out of the stack and give these horses.” The boy soon came with two small bundles. “You infernal rascal, couldn’t you tote more fodder than that? Go back and bring four or five bundles, and be quick about it, or I’ll lick you.” The boy walked slowly back, and returned with four bundles more.

But on entering at night we were struck with the air of comfort that met us. We were seated in rocking-chairs in a well-furnished room, before a blazing fire, offered water to wash, in a little lean-to bed-room, and, though we had two hours to wait for our supper, it was most excellent, and we passed an agreeable evening in intelligent conversation with our host.

After his curiosity about us was satisfied, we learned from him that, though a young man, he was an old settler, and had made a comfortable fortune by his plantation. His wife gave us a picturesque account of their waggon journey here with their people, and described the hardships, dangers, and privations they had at first to endure. Now they were far more comfortable than they could have ever hoped to have been in the State from which they came. They thought their farm the best cotton land in the world. It extended across a mile of timbered bottom land from the river, then over a mile of bottom prairie, and included a large tract of the big prairie “for range.” Their field would produce, in a favourable season, three bales to the acre; ordinarily a bale and a half: the “bale” 400 lbs. They had always far more than their hands could pick. It was much more free from weeds than the States, so much so, that three hands would be needed there to cultivate the same area as two here; that is, with the same hands the crop would be one-third greater.

But so anxious is every one in Texas to give all strangers a favourable impression, that all statements as to the extreme profit and healthfulness of lands must be taken with a grain of allowance. We found it very difficult, without impertinent persistence, to obtain any unfavourable facts. Persons not interested informed us, that from one-third to one-half the cotton crop on some of these rich plantations had been cut off by the worm, on several occasions, and that negroes suffered much with dysentery and pneumonia.

It cost them very little to haul their cotton to the coast or to get supplies. They had not been more sickly than they would have been on the Mississippi. They considered that their steady sea-breeze was almost a sure preventive of such diseases as they had higher up the country.

They always employed German mechanics, and spoke well of them. Mexicans were regarded in a somewhat unchristian tone, not as heretics or heathen, to be converted with flannel and tracts, but rather as vermin, to be exterminated. The lady was particularly strong in her prejudices. White folks and Mexicans were never made to live together, anyhow, and the Mexicans had no business here. They were getting so impertinent, and were so well protected by the laws, that the Americans would just have to get together and drive them all out of the country.

On the Chockolate.—“Which way did you come?” asked some one of the old man.

“From ——.”

“See anything of a runaway nigger over there, anywhar?”

“No, sir. What kind of a nigger was it?”

“A small, black, screwed-up-faced nigger.”

“How long has he been out?”

“Nigh two weeks.”

“Whose is he?”

“Judge ——’s, up here. And he cut the judge right bad. Like to have killed the judge. Cut his young master, too.”

“Reckon, if they caught him, ’twould go rather hard with him.”

“Reckon ’twould. We caught him once, but he got away from us again. We was just tying his feet together, and he give me a kick in the face, and broke. I had my six-shooter handy, and I tried to shoot him, but every barrel missed fire. Been loaded a week. We shot at him three times with rifles, but he’d got too far off, and we didn’t hit, but we must have shaved him close. We chased him, and my dog got close to him once. If he’d grip’d him, we should have got him; but he had a dog himself, and just as my dog got within about a yard of him, his dog turned and fit my dog, and he hurt him so bad we couldn’t get him to run him again. We run him close, though, I tell you. Run him out of his coat, and his boots, and a pistol he’d got. But ’twas getting towards dark, and he got into them bayous, and kept swimming from one side to another.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Ten days.”

“If he’s got across the river, he’d get to the Mexicans in two days, and there he’d be safe. The Mexicans’d take care of him.”

“What made him run?”

“The judge gave him a week at Christmas, and when the week was up, I s’pose he didn’t want to go to work again. He got unruly, and they was a goin’ to whip him.”

“Now, how much happier that fellow’d ’a’ been, if he’d just stayed and done his duty. He might have just worked and done his duty, and his master’d ’a’ taken care of him, and given him another week when Christmas come again, and he’d ’a’ had nothing to do but enjoy himself again. These niggers, none of ’em, knows how much happier off they are than if they was free. Now, very likely, he’ll starve to death, or get shot.”

“Oh, the judge treats his niggers too kind. If he was stricter with them, they’d have more respect for him, and be more contented, too.”

“Never do to be too slack with niggers.”

We were riding in company, to-day, with a California drover, named Rankin. He was in search of cattle to drive across the plains. He had taken a drove before from Illinois, and told us that people in that State, of equal circumstances, lived ten times better than here, in all matters of comfort and refinement. He had suffered more in travelling in Texas, than ever on the plains or the mountains. Not long before, in driving some mules with his partner, they came to a house which was the last on the road for fourteen miles. They had nothing in the world in the house but a few ears of corn, they were going to grind in their steel mill for their own breakfast, and wouldn’t sell on any terms. “We hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast, but we actually could get nothing. The only other thing in the cabin, that could be eaten, was a pile of deer-skins, with the hair on. We had to stake our mules, and make a fire, and coil around it. About twelve o’clock there came a norther. We heard it coming, and it made us howl. We didn’t sleep a wink for cold.”

Houston.—We were sitting on the gallery of the hotel. A tall, jet black negro came up, leading by a rope a downcast mulatto, whose hands were lashed by a cord to his waist, and whose face was horribly cut, and dripping with blood. The wounded man crouched and leaned for support against one of the columns of the gallery—faint and sick.

“What’s the matter with that boy?” asked a smoking lounger.

“I run a fork into his face,” answered the negro.

“What are his hands tied for?”

“He’s a runaway, sir.”

“Did you catch him?”

“Yes, sir. He was hiding in the hay-loft, and when I went up to throw some hay to the horses, I pushed the fork down into the mow and it struck something hard. I didn’t know what it was, and I pushed hard, and gave it a turn, and then he hollered, and I took it out.”

“What do you bring him here, for?”

“Come for the key of the jail, sir, to lock him up.”

“What!” said another, “one darkey catch another darkey? Don’t believe that story.”

“Oh yes, mass’r, I tell for true. He was down in our hay-loft, and so you see when I stab him, I have to catch him.”

“Why, he’s hurt bad, isn’t he?”

“Yes, he says I pushed through the bones.”

“Whose nigger is he?”

“He says he belong to Mass’r Frost, sir, on the Brazos.”

The key was soon brought, and the negro led the mulatto away to jail. He walked away limping, crouching, and writhing, as if he had received other injuries than those on his face. The bystanders remarked that the negro had not probably told the whole story.

We afterwards happened to see a gentleman on horseback, and smoking, leading by a long rope through the deep mud, out into the country, the poor mulatto, still limping and crouching, his hands manacled, and his arms pinioned.

There is a prominent slave-mart in town, which holds a large lot of likely-looking negroes, waiting purchasers. In the windows of shops, and on the doors and columns of the hotel, are many written advertisements, headed “A likely negro girl for sale.” “Two negroes for sale.” “Twenty negro boys for sale,” etc.

South-eastern Texas.—We were unable to procure at Houston any definite information with regard to our proposed route. The known roads thence are those that branch northward and westward from their levee, and so thoroughly within lines of business does local knowledge lie, that the eastern shore is completely terra incognita. The roads east were said to be bad after heavy rains, but the season had been dry, and we determined to follow the direct and the distinct road, laid down upon our map.

Now that I am in a position to give preliminary information, however, there is no reason why the reader should enter this region as ignorant as we did.

Our route took us by Harrisburg and San Jacinto to Liberty, upon the Trinity; thence by Beaumont to the Sabine at Turner’s ferry; thence by the Big Woods and Lake Charles to Opelousas, the old capital of St. Landry Parish, at the western head of the intricate navigation from New Orleans.

This large district, extending from the Trinity River to the bayous of the Mississippi, has, throughout, the same general characteristics, the principal of which are, lowness, flatness, and wetness. The soil is variable, but is in greater part a loose, sandy loam, covered with coarse grasses, forming level prairies, which are everywhere broken by belts of pine forests, usually bordering creeks and bayous, but often standing in islands. The surface is but very slightly elevated above the sea; I suppose, upon an average, less than ten feet. It is, consequently, imperfectly drained, and in a wet season a large proportion is literally covered with water, as in crossing it, even in a dry time, we were obliged to wade through many miles of marshy pools. The river-bottoms, still lower than the general level, are subject to constant overflow by tide-water, and what with the fallen timber, the dense undergrowth, the mire-quags, the abrupt gullies, the patches of rotten or floating corduroy, and three or four feet of dirty salt water, the roads through them are not such as one would choose for a morning ride. The country is sparsely settled, containing less than one inhabitant to the square mile, one in four being a slave.

The many pools, through which the usual track took us, were swarming with venemous water-snakes, four or five black moccasins often lifting at once their devilish heads above the dirty surface, and wriggling about our horses’ heels. Beyond the Sabine, alligator holes are an additional excitement, the unsuspicious traveller suddenly sinking through the treacherous surface, and sometimes falling a victim, horse and all, to the hideous jaws of the reptile, while overwhelmed by the engulfing mire in which he lurks.

Upon the whole, this is not the spot in which I should prefer to come to light, burn, and expire; in fact, if the nether regions, as was suggested by the dream-gentleman of Nachitoches, be “a boggy country,” the avernal entrance might, I should think, with good probabilities, be looked for in this region.

We passed, on both sides the Sabine, many abandoned farms, and the country is but thinly settled. We found it impossible to obtain any information about roads, and frequently went astray upon cattle paths, once losing twenty miles in a day’s journey. The people were chiefly herdsmen, cultivating a little cotton upon river-banks, but ordinarily only corn, with a patch of cane to furnish household sugar. We tried in vain to purchase corn for our horses, and were told that “folks didn’t make corn enough to bread them, and if anybody had corn to give his horse, he carried it in his hat and went out behind somewhere.” The herds were in poor condition, and must in winter be reduced to the verge of starvation. We saw a few hogs, converted, by hardship, to figures so unnatural, that we at first took them for goats. Most of the people we met were old emigrants, from Southern Louisiana and Mississippi, and more disposed to gaiety and cheer than the Texan planters. The houses showed a tendency to Louisiana forms, and the table to a French style of serving the jerked beef, which is the general dish of the country. The meat is dried in strips, over smoky fires, and, if untainted and well prepared, is a tolerably savoury food. I hardly know whether to chronicle it as a border barbarism, or a Creolism, that we were several times, in this neighbourhood, shown to a bed standing next to that occupied by the host and his wife, sometimes with the screen of a shawl, sometimes without.

We met with one specimen of the Virginia habit of “dipping,” or snuff-chewing, in the person of a woman who was otherwise neat and agreeable, and observed that a young lady, well-dressed, and apparently engaged, while we were present, in reading, went afterward to light her pipe at the kitchen fire, and had a smoke behind the house.

The condition of the young men appeared to incline decidedly to barbarism. We stopped a night at a house in which a drover, bringing mules from Mexico, was staying; and, with the neighbours who had come to look at the drove, we were thirteen men at table. When speaking with us, all were polite and respectful, the women especially so; but among one another, their coarseness was incredible. The master of the house, a well-known gentleman of the county, who had been absent when we arrived, and at supper-time, came afterwards upon the gallery and commenced cursing furiously, because some one had taken his pipe. Seeing us, he stopped abruptly, and after lighting the pipe, said, in a rather peremptory and formal, but not uncourteous tone: “Where are you from, gentlemen?”

“From Beaumont, sir, last.”

“Been out West?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Travelling?”

“Yes, sir.”

After pausing a moment to make up his mind—

“Where do you live when you are at home, gentlemen, and what’s your business in this country?”

“We live in New York, and are travelling to see the country.”

“How do you like it?”

“Just here we find it flat and wet.”

“What’s your name?”

“Olmsted.”

“And what’s this gentleman’s name?”

“Olmsted.”

“Is it a Spanish name?”

“No, sir.”

He then abruptly left us, and the young men entertained one another with stories of fights and horse-trades, and with vulgar obscenities.

Shortly he returned, saying—

“Show you to bed now, gentlemen, if you wish.”

“We are ready, sir, if you will be good enough to get a light.”

“A light?”

“Yes, sir.”

“A light?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Get a light?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well” (after a moment’s hesitation), “I’ll get one.”

On reaching the bed-room, which was in a building adjoining, he stood awaiting our pleasure. Thanking him, I turned to take the light, but his fingers were the candlestick. He continued to hold it, and six young men, who had followed us, stood grouped around while we undressed, placing our clothes upon the floor. Judy advanced to lie down by them. One of the young men started forward, and said—

“I’ve got a right good knife.”

“What?”

“I’ve got a right good knife, if you want it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing, only I’ve got a right good knife, and if you’d like to kill that dog, I’ll lend it to you.”

“Please to tell me what you mean?”

“Oh, nothing.”

“Keep your dog quiet, or I’ll kill her,” I suppose was the interpretation. When we had covered ourselves in bed, the host said—

“I suppose you don’t want the light no more?”

“No, sir;” and all bade us good night; but leaving the door open, commenced feats of prolonged dancing, or stamping upon the gallery, which were uproariously applauded. Then came more obscenities and profanities, apropos to fandango frolics described by the drovers. As we had barely got to sleep, several came to occupy other beds in our room. They had been drinking freely, and continued smoking in bed.

Upon the floor lay two boys of fourteen, who continued shouting and laughing after the others had at length become quiet. Some one soon said to one of them—

“You had better stop your noise; Frank says he’ll be damn’d if he don’t come in and give you a hiding.”

Frank was trying to sleep upon the gallery.

“By ——,” the boy cried, raising himself, and drawing a coat from under the pillow, “if he comes in here, I’ll be damn’d if I don’t kill him. He dare not come in here. I would like to see him come in here,” drawing from his coat pocket a revolver, and cocking it. “By ——, you may come in here now. Come in here, come in here! Do you here that?” (revolving the pistol rapidly). “—— damn me, if I don’t kill you, if you come near the door.”

This continued without remonstrance for some time, when he lay down, asking his companion for a light for his pipe, and continuing the noisy conversation until we fell asleep. The previous talk had been much of knife and pistol fights which had taken place in the county. The same boy was obliging and amiable the next morning, assisting us to bring in and saddle the horses at our departure.

One of the men here was a Yankee, who had lived so long in the Slave States that he had added to his original ruralisms a very complete collection of Southernisms, some of which were of the richest we met with. He had been in the Texas Rangers, and, speaking of the West, said he had been up round the head of the Guadaloupe “heaps and cords of times,” at the same time giving us a very picturesque account of the county. Speaking of wolves, he informed us that on the San Jacinto there were “any dimensions of them.” Obstinacy, in his vocabulary, was represented by “damnation cussedness.” He was unable to conceive of us in any other light than as two peddlers who had mistaken their ground in coming here.

At another house where we stopped (in which, by the way, we ate our supper by the light of pine knots blazing in the chimney, with an apology for the absence of candles), we heard some conversation upon a negro of the neighbourhood, who had been sold to a free negro, and who refused to live with him, saying he wouldn’t be a servant to a nigger. All agreed that he was right, although the man was well known to be kind to his negroes, and would always sell any of them who wished it. The slave had been sold because he wouldn’t mind. “If I had a negro that wouldn’t mind,” said the woman of the house, “I’d break his head, or I’d sell him; I wouldn’t have one about me.” Her own servant was standing behind her. “I do think it would be better if there wasn’t any niggers in the world, they do behave so bad, some of ’em. They steal just like hogs.”

South-western Louisiana.—Soon after crossing the Sabine, we entered a “hummock,” or tract of more fertile, oak-bearing land, known as the Big Woods. The soil is not rich, but produces cotton, in good seasons nearly a bale to the acre, and the limited area is fully occupied. Upon one plantation we found an intelligent emigrant from Mississippi, who had just bought the place, having stopped on his way into Texas, because the time drew near for the confinement of his wife. Many farms are bought by emigrants, he said, from such temporary considerations: a child is sick, or a horse exhausted; they stop for a few weeks; but summer comes, and they conclude to put in a crop, and often never move again.

It was before reaching the Big Woods, that alligator-holes were first pointed out to us, with a caution to avoid them. They extend from an aperture, obliquely, under ground, to a large cavern, the walls of which are puddled by the motions of the animal; and, being partly filled with water, form a comfortable amphibious residence. A horseman is liable, not only to breaking through near the orifice, but to being precipitated into the den itself, where he will find awaiting him, a disagreeable mixture of mire and angry jaws. In the deep water of the bottoms, we met with no snakes; but the pools were everywhere alive with them. We saw a great variety of long-legged birds, apparently on friendly terms with all the reptiles.

A day’s journey took us through the Big Woods, and across Calcasieu to Lake Charles. We were not prepared to find the Calcasieu a superb and solemn river, two hundred and thirty yards across and forty-five feet deep. It is navigable for forty miles, but at its mouth has a bar, on which is sometimes only eighteen inches of water, ordinarily thirty inches. Schooners of light draft ascend it, bringing supplies, and taking out the cotton raised within its reach. Lake Charles is an insignificant village, upon the bank of a pleasant, clear lakelet, several miles in extent.

From the Big Woods to Opelousas, there was no change in the monotonous scenery. Everywhere extended the immense moist plain, being alternate tracts of grass and pine. Nearer Opelousas, oak appears in groups with the pine, and the soil is darker and more fertile. Here the land was mostly taken up, partly by speculators, in view of the Opelousas Railway, then commenced. But, in all the western portion of the district, the land is still government property, and many of the people squatters. Sales are seldom made, but the estimated price of the land is fifty cents an acre.

Some of the timbered land, for a few years after clearing, yields good crops of corn and sweet potatoes. Cotton is seldom attempted, and sugar only for family use. Oats are sometimes grown, but the yield is small, and seldom thrashed from the straw. We noted one field of poor rye. So wet a region and so warm a climate suggested rice, and, were the land sufficiently fertile, it would, doubtless, become a staple production. It is now only cultivated for home use, the bayou bottoms being rudely arranged for flowing the crop. But without manure no profitable return can be obtained from breaking the prairie, and the only system of manuring in use is that of ploughing up occasionally the cow-pens of the herdsmen.

The road was now distinctly marked enough, but had frequent and embarrassing forks, which occasioned us almost as much annoyance as the clouds of musquitoes which, east of the Sabine, hovered continually about our horses and our heads. Notions of distance we found incredibly vague. At Lake Charles we were informed that the exact distance to Opelousas was ninety-six miles. After riding eight hours, we were told by a respectable gentleman that the distance from his house was one hundred and twenty miles. The next evening the distance was forty miles; and the following evening a gentleman who met us stated first that it was “a good long way;” next, that it was “thirty or forty miles, and damn’d long ones, too.” About four miles beyond him, we reached the twentieth mile-post.

Across the bayous of any size, bridges had been constructed, but so rudely built of logs that the traveller, where possible, left them for a ford.

The people, after passing the frontier, changed in every prominent characteristic. French became the prevailing language, and French the prevailing manners. The gruff Texan bidding, “Sit up, stranger; take some fry!” became a matter of recollection, of which “Monsieur, la soupe est servie,” was the smooth substitute. The good-nature of the people was an incessant astonishment. If we inquired the way, a contented old gentleman waddled out and showed us also his wife’s house-pet, an immense white crane, his big crop of peaches, his old fig-tree, thirty feet in diameter of shade, and to his wish of “bon voyage” added for each a bouquet of the jessamines we were admiring. The homes were homes, not settlements on speculation; the house, sometimes of logs, it is true, but hereditary logs, and more often of smooth lumber, with deep and spreading galleries on all sides for the coolest comfort. For form, all ran or tended to run to a peaked and many-chimneyed centre, with, here and there, a suggestion of a dormar window. Not all were provided with figs and jessamines, but each had some inclosure betraying good intentions.

The monotonous landscape did not invite to loitering, and we passed but three nights in houses by the road. The first was that of an old Italian-French emigrant, known as “Old Man Corse.” He had a name of his own, which he recalled for us, but in forty years it had been lost and superseded by this designation, derived from his birth-place, the island of Corsica. This mixture of nationalities in language must be breeding for future antiquaries a good deal of amusing labour. Next day we were recommended to stop at Jack Bacon’s, and, although we would have preferred to avoid an American’s, did so rather than go further, and found our Jack Bacon a Creole, named Jacques Béguin. This is equal to Tuckapaw and Nakitosh, the general pronunciation of Attakapas and Nachitoches.

The house of Old Man Corse stood in the shade of oaks, figs, and cypresses, upon the bank of a little bayou, looking out upon the broad prairie. It was large and comfortable, with wide galleries and dormar windows, supported by a negro-hut and a stable. Ornamental axe-work and rude decorative joinery were abundant. The roof was of large split shingles, much warped in the sun. As we entered and took seats by the fire, the room reminded us, with its big fire-place, and old smoke-stained and time-toned cypress beams and ceiling, and its rude but comfortable aspect, of the Acadian fireside:

“In doors, warm by the wide-mouthed fire-place, idly the farmer

Sat in his elbow-chair, and watched how the flames and the smoke-wreaths

Struggled together, like foes in a burning city. Behind him,

Nodding and mocking along the wall, with gestures fantastic,

Darted his own huge shadow, and vanished away into darkness,

Faces, clumsily carved in oak, on the back of his arm-chair,

Laughed in the flickering light, and the pewter plates on the dresser

Caught and reflected the flame, as shields of armies the sunshine.”

The tall, elderly, busy housewife bustled about with preparations for supper, while we learned that they had been settled here forty years, and had never had reason to regret their emigration. The old man had learnt French, but no English. The woman could speak some “American,” as she properly termed it. Asking her about musquitoes, we received a reply in French, that they were more abundant some years than others; then, as no quantitative adjective of sufficient force occurred to her, she added, “Three years ago, oh! heaps of musquitoes, sir, heaps! worse as now.”

She laid the table to the last item, and prepared everything nicely, but called a negro girl to wait upon us. The girl stood quiet behind us, the mistress helping us, and practically anticipating all our wants.

The supper was of venison, in ragoût, with a sauce that savoured of the south of France; there was a side dish of hominy, a jug of sweet milk, and wheat-bread in loaf—the first since Houston.

In an evening smoke, upon the settle, we learned that there were many Creoles about here, most of whom learned English, and had their children taught English at the schools. The Americans would not take the trouble to learn French. They often intermarried. A daughter of their own was the wife of an American neighbour. We asked if they knew of a distinct people here called Acadians. Oh yes, they knew many settled in the vicinity, descended from some nation that came here in the last century. They had now no peculiarities. There were but few free negroes just here, but at Opelousas and Niggerville there were many, some of whom were rich and owned slaves, though a part were unmixed black in colour. They kept pretty much by themselves, not attempting to enter white society.

As we went to look at our horses, two negroes followed us to the stable.

“Dat horse a Tennessee horse, mass’r,” said one.

“Yes, he was born in Tennessee.”

“Born in Tennessee and raised by a Dutchman,” said the other, sotto voce, I suppose, quoting a song.

“Why, were you born in Tennessee?” I asked.

“No, sar, I was born in dis State.”

“How comes it you speak English so much better than your master?”

“Ho, ho, my old mass’r, he don’ speak it at all; my missus she speak it better’n my mass’r do, but you see I war raised on de parara, to der eastward, whar thar’s heaps of ’Mericans; so I larned it good.”

He spoke it, with a slight accent, while the other, whom he called Uncle Tom, I observed did not. I asked Uncle Tom if he was born in the State.

“No, sar! I was born in Varginny! in ole Varginny, mass’r. I was raised in —— county [in the West]. I was twenty-two year ole when I came away from thar, and I’ve been in this country, forty year come next Christmas.”

“Then you are sixty years old.”

“Yes, sar, amos’ sixty. But I’d like to go back to Varginny. Ho, ho! I ’ould like to go back and live in ole Varginny, again.”

“Why so? I thought niggers generally liked this country best—I’ve been told so—because it is so warm here.”

“Ho, ho! it’s mos’ too warm here, sometime, and I can’t work at my trade here. Sometimes for three months I don’ go in my shop, on’y Sundays to work for mysef.”

“What is your trade?”

“I’m a blacksmith, mass’r. I used to work at blacksmithing all the time in ole Virginny, ironin’ waggons, and shoein’ horses for the folks that work in the mines. But here, can’t get nothun’ to do. In this here sile, if you sharpen up a plough in the spring o’ the year, it’ll last all summer, and horses don’ want shoeing once a year, here on the parara. I’ve got a good mass’r here, tho’; the ole man ain’t hard on his niggers.”

“Was your master hard in Virginia?”

“Well, I wos hired to different mass’rs, sar, thar, afore I wos sole off. I was sole off to a sheriff’s sale, mass’r: I wos sole for fifteen hunerd an’ fifty dollars; I fetched that on the block, cash, I did, and the man as bought me he brung me down here, and sole me for two thousand two hunerd dollars.”

“That was a good price; a very high price in those days.”

“Yes, sar, it was that—ho, ho, ho! It was a man by the name of ——, from Tennessee, what bought me. He made a business of goin’ roun’ and buyin’ up people, and bringin’ ’em down here, speculatin’ on ’em. Ho, ho! he did well that time. But I’d ’a’ liked it better, for all that, to have stayed in ole Varginny. ’Tain’t the heat, tho’ it’s too hot here sometimes; but you know, sar, I was born and raised in Varginny, and seems like ’twould be pleasanter to live thar. It’s kinder natural to people to hanker arter the place they wos raised in. Ho, ho! I’d like it a heap better, tho’ this ole man’s a good mass’r; never had no better mass’r.”

“I suppose you became a Catholic after you got here?”

“Yes, sar” (hesitatingly).

“I suppose all the people are Catholics here?”

“Here? Oh, no, sar; they was whar I wos first in this here country; they wos all Catholics there.”

“Well, they are all Catholics here, too—ain’t they?”

“Here, sar? Here, sar? Oh, no, sar!”

“Why, your master is not a Protestant, is he?”

After two deep groans, he replied in a whisper:

“Oh, sar, they don’ have no meetin’ o’ no kind, roun’ here!”

“There are a good many free negroes in this country, ain’t there?”

“What! here, sar? Oh, no, sar; no such good luck as that in this country.”

“At Opelousas, I understood, there were a good many.”

“Oh, but them wos born free, sar, under old Spain, sar.”

“Yes, those I mean.”

“Oh, yes, there’s lots o’ them; some of ’em rich, and some of ’em—a good many of ’em—goes to the penitentiary—you know what that is. White folks goes to the penitenti’ry, too—ho! ho!—sometimes.”

“I have understood many of them were quite rich.”

“Oh, yes, o’ course they is: they started free, and ain’t got nobody to work for but theirselves; of course they gets rich. Some of ’em owns slaves—heaps of ’em. That ar ain’t right.”

“Not right! why not?”

“Why, you don’ think it’s right for one nigger to own another nigger! One nigger’s no business to sarve another. It’s bad enough to have to sarve a white man without being paid for it, without having to sarve a black man.”

“Don’t they treat their slaves well?”

“No, sar, they don’t. There ain’t no nations so bad masters to niggers as them free niggers, though there’s some, I’ve heard, wos very kind; but—I wouldn’t sarve ’em if they wos—no!—Does you live in Tennessee, mass’r?”

“No—in New York.”

“There’s heaps of Quakers in New York, ain’t there, mass’r?”

“No—not many.”

“I’ve always heard there was.”

“In Philadelphia there are a good many.”

“Oh, yes! in Philadelphia, and in Winchester, and in New Jarsey. I know—ho! ho! I’ve been in those countries, and I’ve seen ’em. I wos raised nigh by Winchester, and I’ve been all about there. Used to iron waggons and shoe horses in that country. Dar’s a road from Winchester to Philadelphia—right straight. Quakers all along. Right good people, dem Quakers—ho! ho!—I know.”[2]

We slept in well-barred beds, and awoke long after sunrise. As soon as we were stirring, black coffee was sent into us, and at breakfast we had café au lait in immense bowls in the style of the crêmeries of Paris. The woman remarked that our dog had slept in their bed-room. They had taken our saddle-bags and blankets with them for security, and Judy had insisted on following them. “Dishonest black people might come here and get into the room,” explained the old man. “Yes; and some of our own people in the house might come to them. Such things have happened here, and you never can trust any of them,” said the woman, her own black girl behind her chair.

At Mr. Béguin’s (Bacon’s) we stopped on a Saturday night: and I was obliged to feed my own horse in the morning, the negroes having all gone off before daylight. The proprietor was a Creole farmer, owning a number of labourers, and living in comfort. The house was of the ordinary Southern double-cabined style, the people speaking English, intelligent, lively, and polite, giving us good entertainment at the usual price. At a rude corn-mill belonging to Mr. Béguin, we had noticed among the negroes an Indian boy, in negro clothing, and about the house were two other Indians—an old man and a young man; the first poorly clad, the other gaily dressed in a showy printed calico frock, and worked buckskin leggings, with beads and tinsel ornaments, a great turban of Scotch shawl-stuff on his head. It appeared they were Choctaws, of whom a good many lived in the neighbourhood. The two were hired for farm labour at three bits (37½ cents) a day. The old man had a field of his own, in which stood handsome corn. Some of them were industrious, but none were steady at work—often refusing to go on, or absenting themselves from freaks. I asked about the boy at the mill. He lived there and did work, getting no wages, but “living there with the niggers.” They seldom consort; our host knew but one case in which a negro had an Indian wife.

At Lake Charles we had seen a troop of Alabamas, riding through the town with baskets and dressed deerskins for sale. They were decked with feathers, and dressed more showily than the Choctaws, but in calico: and over their heads, on horseback—curious progress of manners—all carried open, black cotton umbrellas.

Our last night in this region was spent in a house which we reached at sundown of a Sunday afternoon. It proved to be a mere cottage, in a style which has grown to be common along our road. The walls are low, of timber and mud; the roof, high, and sloping from a short ridge in all directions; and the chimney of sticks and mud. The space is divided into one long living-room, having a kitchen at one end and a bed-room at the other. As we rode up, we found only a little boy, who answered us in French. His mother was milking, and his father out in the field.

We rode on to the fence of the field, which enclosed twenty acres, planted in cotton, corn, and sweet potatoes, and waited until the proprietor reached us and the end of his furrow. He stopped before replying, to unhitch his horse, then gave consent to our staying in his house, and we followed his lead to the yard, where we unsaddled our horses. He was a tall, stalwart man in figure, with a large intellectual head, but as uninformed, we afterwards discovered, as any European peasant; though he wore, as it were, an ill-fitting dress of rude independence in manner, such as characterises the Western man.

The field was well cultivated, and showed the best corn we had seen east of the Brazos. Three negro men and two women were at work, and continued hoeing until sunset. They were hired, it appeared, by the proprietor, at four bits (fifty cents) a day. He was in the habit of making use of the Sundays of the slaves of the neighbourhood in this way, paying them sometimes seventy-five cents a day.

On entering the house, we were met by two young boys, gentle and winning in manner, coming up of their own accord to offer us their hands. They were immediately set to work by their father at grinding corn, in the steel-mill, for supper. The task seemed their usual one, yet very much too severe for their strength, as they were slightly built, and not over ten years old. Taking hold at opposite sides of the winch, they ground away, outside the door, for more than an hour, constantly stopping to take breath, and spurred on by the voice of the papa, if the delay were long.

They spoke only French, though understanding questions in English. The man and his wife—an energetic but worn woman—spoke French or English indifferently, even to one another, changing, often, in a single sentence. He could not tell us which was his mother tongue; he had always been as much accustomed to the one as to the other. He said he was not a Frenchman, but a native, American-born; but afterwards called himself a “Dutch-American,” a phrase he was unable to explain. He informed us that there were many “Dutch-French” here, that is, people who were Dutch, but who spoke French.

The room into which we were ushered, was actually without an article of furniture. The floor was of boards, while those of the other two rooms were of trodden clay. The mud-walls had no other relief than the mantel, on which stood a Connecticut clock, two small mirrors, three or four cheap cups and saucers, and a paste brooch in the form of a cross, pinned upon paper, as in a jeweller’s shop. Chairs were brought in from the kitchen, having deer-hide seats, from which sprang forth an atrocious number of fresh fleas.

We had two or three hours to wait for our late supper, and thus more than ample time to converse with our host, who proceeded to twist and light a shuck cigar. He made, he said, a little cotton, which he hauled ten miles to be ginned and baled. For this service he paid seventy-five cents a hundred weight, in which the cost of bagging was not included. The planter who baled it, also sold it for him, sending it, with his own, to a factor in New Orleans, by steamboat from Niggerville, just beyond Opelousas. Beside cotton, he sold every year some beef cattle. He had a good many cows, but didn’t exactly know how many. Corn, too, he sometimes sold, but only to neighbours, who had not raised enough for themselves. It would not pay to haul it to any market. The same applied to sweet potatoes, which were considered worth seventy-five cents a barrel.

The “range” was much poorer than formerly. It was crowded, and people would have to take their stock somewhere else in four or five years more, or they would starve. He didn’t know what was going to become of poor folks, rich people were taking up the public land so fast, induced by the proposed railroad to New Orleans.

More or less stock was always starved in winter. The worst time for them was when a black gnat, called the “eye-breaker,” comes out. This insect breeds in the low woodlands, and when a freshet occurs in winter is driven out in swarms upon the prairies, attacking cattle terribly. They were worse than all manner of musquitoes, flies, or other insects. Cattle would herd together then, and wander wildly about, not looking for the best feed, and many would get killed. But this did not often happen.

Horses and cattle had degenerated much within his recollection. No pains were taken to improve breeds. People, now-a-days, had got proud, and when they had a fine colt would break him for a carriage or riding-horse, leaving only the common scurvy sort to run with the mares. This was confirmed by our observation, the horses about here being wretched in appearance, and the grass short and coarse.

When we asked to wash before supper, a shallow cake-pan was brought and set upon the window-seat, and a mere rag offered us for towel. Upon the supper-table, we found two wash-bowls, one filled with milk, the other with molasses. We asked for water, which was given us in one battered tin cup. The dishes, besides the bacon and bread, were fried eggs and sweet potatoes. The bowl of molasses stood in the centre of the table, and we were pressed to partake of it, as the family did, by dipping in it bits of bread. But how it was expected to be used at breakfast, when we had bacon and potatoes, with spoons, but no bread, I cannot imagine, the family not breakfasting with us.

The night was warm, and musquitoes swarmed, but we carried with us a portable tent-shaped bar, which we hung over the feather bed, upon the floor, and rested soundly amid their mad singing.

The distance to Opelousas, our Frenchman told us, was fifteen miles by the road, though only ten miles in a direct line. We found it lined with farms, whose division-fences the road always followed, frequently changing its course in so doing at a right angle. The country was very wet and unattractive. About five miles from the town, begin plantations on an extensive scale, upon better soil, and here were large gangs of negroes at work upon cotton, with their hoes.

At the outskirts of the town, we waded the last pool, and entered, with a good deal of satisfaction, the peaceful shaded streets. Reaching the hotel, we were not so instantly struck as perhaps we should have been, with the overwhelming advantages of civilization, which sat in the form of a landlord, slapping with an agate-headed, pliable cane, his patent leather boots, poised, at easy height, upon one of the columns of the gallery. We were suffered to take off our saddle-bags, and to wait until waiting was no longer a pleasure, before civilization, wringing his cane against the floor, but not removing his cigar, brought his patent leathers to our vicinity.

After some conversation, intended as animated upon one side and ineffably indifferent on the other, our horses obtained notice from that exquisitely vague eye, but a further introduction was required before our persons became less than transparent, for the boots walked away, and became again a subject of contemplation upon the column, leaving us, with our saddle-bags, upon the steps. After inquiring, of a bystander if this glossy individual were the actual landlord, we attacked him in a tone likely to produce either a revolver-shot or a room, but whose effect was to obtain a removal of the cigar and a gentle survey, ending in a call for a boy to show the gentlemen to number thirteen.

After an hour’s delay, we procured water, and were about to enjoy very necessary ablutions, when we observed that the door of our room was partly of uncurtained glass. A shirt was pinned to this, and ceremonies were about beginning, when a step came down the passage, and a gentleman put his hand through a broken pane, and lifted the obstruction, wishing “to see what was going on so damn’d secret in number thirteen.” When I walked toward him hurriedly, in puris naturalibus, he drew hastily and entered the next room.

On the gallery of the hotel, after dinner, a fine-looking man—who was on the best of terms with every one—familiar with the judge—and who had been particularly polite to me, at the dinner-table, said to another:

“I hear you were very unlucky with that girl you bought of me, last year?”

“Yes, I was; very unlucky. She died with her first child, and the child died, too.”

“Well, that was right hard for you. She was a fine girl. I don’t reckon you lost less than five thousand dollars, when she died.”

“No, sir, not a dollar less.”

“Well, it came right hard upon you—just beginning so.”

“Yes, I was foolish, I suppose, to risk so much on the life of a single woman; but I’ve got a good start again now, for all that. I’ve got two right likely girls; one of them’s got a fine boy, four months old, and the other’s with child—and old Pine Knot’s as hearty as ever.”

“Is he? Hasn’t been sick at all, eh?”

“Yes; he was sick very soon after I bought him of you; but he got well soon.”

“That’s right. I’d rather a nigger would be sick early, after he comes into this country; for he’s bound to be acclimated, sooner or later, and the longer it’s put off, the harder it goes with him.”

The man was a regular negro trader. He told me that he had a partner in Kentucky, and that they owned a farm there, and another one here. His partner bought negroes, as opportunity offered to get them advantageously, and kept them on their Kentucky farm; and he went on occasionally, and brought the surplus to their Louisiana plantation—where he held them for sale.

“So-and-so is very hard upon you,” said another man, to him as he still sat, smoking his cigar, on the gallery, after dinner.