Four Months in a Sneak-Box Part 6

It is singular that Alexander Wilson, and, in fact, all the naturalists, except Audubon, who have written about this interesting bird, have failed to examine its nest and eggs. By the unsatisfactory manner in which Audubon refers to the nidification of this parakeet, one is led to believe that even he did not become personally acquainted with its breeding habits.

The offer by Mr. Maynard of one dollar for every parrot's egg delivered to him, induced a Florida cracker to cut a path into a dense cypress swamp at Dunn's Lake, about the middle of the month of June.

The hunter was occupied three days in the enterprise, and returned much disgusted with the job. He had found the nests of the parakeets in the hollow cypress-trees of the swamp, but he was too late to secure the eggs, as they were hatched, and the nests filled with young birds. The number of young in each nest seemed to leave no doubt of the fact of several adults nesting in one hole. Probably the eggs are laid about the last of May.

These birds are extremely gregarious, and have been seen at sunset to cl.u.s.ter upon the trunk of a gigantic cypress like a swarm of bees. One after another slowly crawls through a hole into the cavity until it is filled up, while those who are not so fortunate as to obtain entrance, or reserved seats, cling to the outside of the trunk with their claws, and keep their position through the night chiefly by hooking the tip of the upper mandible of the beak into the bark of the tree. The backwoodsmen confidently a.s.sert that they have found as many as twenty eggs of a greenish white in a single hollow of a cypress-tree; and as it is generally supposed, judging from the known habits of other species of this genus, that the Carolina Parrot lays only two eggs, but few naturalists doubt that these birds nest in companies. It is a very difficult task to find the nests of parrots in the West Indies, some of them building in the hollowed top of the dead trunk of a royal palm which has been denuded of its branches; and there, upon the unprotected summit of a single column eighty feet in height, without any shelter from tropical storms, the Cuban Parrot rears its young.

The Carolina Parrot is the only one of this species which may truly be said to be a permanent resident of our country. The Mexican species are sometimes met with along the southwestern boundaries of the United States, but they emigrate only a few miles northward of their own regions. The salt-licks in the great b.u.t.ton-wood bottoms along the Mississippi were once the favorite resorts of these birds, and they delighted to drink the saline water. It is to be regretted that so interesting a bird should have been so ruthlessly slaughtered where they were once so numerous. Only the young birds are fit to eat, but we read in the accounts of our pioneer naturalists that from eight to twenty birds were often killed by the single discharge of a gun, and that as the survivors would again and again return to the lurking- place of their destroyer, attracted by the distressing cries of their wounded comrades, the unfeeling sportsman would continue his work of destruction until more than half of a large flock would be exterminated. This interesting parakeet may, during the next century, pa.s.s out of existence, and be known to our descendants as the Great Auk (Alca impennis) is now known to us, as a very rare specimen in the museums of natural history.

On Monday, January 3, I rowed out of the Bayou du Chien, and soon reached the town of Hickman, Kentucky, where I invested in a basketful of mince-pies, that deleterious compound so dear to every American heart. A large flatboat, built upon the most primitive principles, and without cabin of any kind, was leaving the landing, evidently bound on a fis.h.i.+ng-cruise, for her hold was filled with long nets and barrels of provisions. A large roll of canvas, to be used as a protection against rain, was stowed in one end of the odd craft, while at the other end was a large and very rusty cooking-stove, with a joint of pipe rising above it. The crew of fishermen labored at a pair of long sweeps until the flat reached the strong current, when they took in their oars, and, cl.u.s.tering about the stove, filled their pipes, and were soon reclining at their ease on the pile of nets, apparently as well satisfied with their tub as Diogenes was with his. As I rowed past them, they roused themselves into some semblance of interest, and gazed upon the little white boat, so like a pumpkin-seed in shape, which soon pa.s.sed from their view as it disappeared down the wide Mississippi.

There was something in the appearance of that rough flatboat that made me wish I had hailed her quiet crew; for, strange to say, they did not send after me a shower of slang phrases and uncouth criticisms, the usual prelude to conversation among flatboat-men when they desire to cultivate the acquaintance of a fellow-voyager. In fact, it was rather startling not to have the usual greeting, and I wondered why I heard no friendly expressions, such as, "Here, you river thief, haul alongside and report yourself! Whar did you come from? Come and take a pull at the bottle! It's prime stuff, I tell ye; will kill a man at forty paces," &c. The rusty stove was as strong an attraction as the quiet crew, as I thought how convenient it would be to run alongside of the old boat and utilize it for my culinary purposes. The unwonted silence, however, proved conclusively that some refined instinct, unknown to the usual crews of such boats, governed these voyagers, and I feared to intrude upon so dignified a party.

Descending a long straight reach, after making a run of twenty-three miles, I crossed the limits of Kentucky, and, entering Tennessee, saw on its sh.o.r.e, in a deep bend of the river, the site of a fortification, while opposite to it lay the low Island No. 10. Both of these places were full of interest, being the scenes of conflict in our civil war. The little white sneak-box glided down another long bend, over the wrecks of seven steamboats, and pa.s.sed New Madrid, on the Missouri sh.o.r.e. The mouth of Reelfoot Bayou then opened before me, a creek which conducts the waters from the weird recesses of one of the most interesting lakes in America,--a lake which was the immediate result of a disastrous series of disturbances generally referred to as the New Madrid earthquakes, and which took place in 1811-13. Much of the country in the vicinity of New Madrid and Fort Donaldson was involved in these serious shocks. Swamps were upheaved and converted into dry uplands, while cultivated uplands were depressed below the average water level, and became swamps or ponds of water. 'The inhabitants, deprived of their little farms, were reduced to such a stage of suffering as to call for aid from government, and new lands were granted them in place of their fields which had sunk out of sight. Hundreds of square miles of territory were lost during the two years of terrestrial convulsions.

The most interesting effect of the subsidence of the land was the creation of Reelfoot Lake, the fluvial entrance to which is from the tortuous Mississippi some forty-five miles below Hickman, Kentucky.

The northern portion of the lake is west of and a short distance from Fort Donaldson, about twenty miles from Hickman, by the river route.

As Reelfoot Lake possesses the peculiar flora and characteristics of a mult.i.tude of other swamp-lakes throughout the wilderness of the lower Mississippi valley, I cannot better describe them all than by giving to the reader a description of that lake, written by an intelligent observer who visited the locality in 1874.

"Nothing," he says, "could well exceed the singularity of the view that meets the eye as one comes out of the shadows of the forest on to the border of this sheet of water. From the marshy sh.o.r.e spreads out the vast extent of the seemingly level carpet of vegetation,--a mat of plants, studded over with a host of beautiful flowers; through this green prairie runs a maze of water-ways, some just wide enough for a pirogue, some widening into pools of darkened water. All over this expanse rise the trunks of gigantic cypresses, shorn of all their limbs, and left like great obelisks, scattered so thickly that the distance is lost in the forest of spires. Some are whitened and some blackened by decay and fire; many rise to a hundred feet or more above the lake. The branches are all gone, save in a few more gigantic forms, whose fantastic remnants of the old forest arches add to the illusion of monumental ruin which forces itself on the mind. The singularity of the general effect is quite matched by the wonder of the detail.

"Taking the solitary dug-out canoe, or pirogue, as it is called in the vernacular, we paddled out into the tangle of water-paths. The green carpet, studded with yellow and white, that we saw from the sh.o.r.es, resolved itself into a marvellously beautiful and varied vegetation.

From the tangle of curious forms the eye selects two n.o.ble flowers: our familiar northern water-lily, grown to a royal form, its flowers ten inches broad, and its floating pads near a foot across; and another grander flower, the Wampapin lily, the queen of American flowers. It is worth a long journey to see this shy denizen of our swamps in its full beauty. From the midst of its great floating leaves, which are two feet or more in diameter, rise two large leaves borne upon stout foot-stalks that bring them a yard above the water; from between these elevated leaves rises to a still greater height the stem of the flower. The corolla itself is a gold-colored cup a foot in diameter, lily-like in a general way, but with a large pestle-shaped ovary rising in the centre of the flower, in which are planted a number of large seeds, the 'pins' of Wampapin. These huge golden cups are poised on their stems, and wave in the breeze above great wheel- like leaves, while the innumerable white lilies fill in the s.p.a.ces between, and enrich the air with their perfume.

"Slowly we crept through the tangled paths until we were beyond the sight of sh.o.r.e, in the perfect silence of this vast ruined temple, on every side the endless obelisks of the decaying cypress, and as far as the eye could see were ranged the numberless nodding bells of the yellow lilies, and the still-eyed white stars below them. While we waited in the coming evening, the silence was so deep, the whir of a bald eagle's wings, as he swept through the air, was audible from afar. The lonely creature sat on the peak of one of the wooden towers over our boat, and looked curiously down upon us. The waters seemed full of fish, and, indeed, the lake has much celebrity as a place for such game. We could see them creeping through the mazes of the water- forest, in a slow, blind way, not a bit like the dance of the northern creatures of the active waters of our mountain streams.

"There is something of forgetfulness in such a scene, a sense of a world far away, with no path back to it. One might fall to eating our Wampapin lily, as did the Chickasaws of old, and find in it the all- forgetting lotus, for it is, indeed, the brother of the lotus of the Nile. We do not know how far these forgotten savages found the mystic influence of the Nilotic lotus in these queenly flowers of the swamps, but tradition says that they ate not only the seeds, but the bulbous roots, which the natives aver are quite edible. So we, too, can claim a lotus-eating race, and are even able to try the soul-subduing powers of the plant at our will.

"There is something in the weight of life and death in these swamps that subdues the mind, and makes the steps we take fall as in a dream.

It was not easy to fix a basis for memory with the pencil, and recollection shapes a vast sensation of strangeness, a feeling as if one had trod for a moment beyond the brink of time, rather than any distinct images."

At sunset I came upon Joe Eckel's Bar,--not the fluvial establishment so much resorted to by people ash.o.r.e,--but a genuine Mississippi sandbar, or shoal, which was covered with two feet of water, and afforded lodgment for a heavy raft of trees that had floated upon it.

The island was also partly submerged, but I found a cove with a sandy beach on its lower end; and running into the little bay, I staked the boat in one foot of water, much to the annoyance of flocks of wild- fowl which circled about me at intervals all night. The current had been turbid during the day, and to supply myself with drinking-water it was necessary to fill a can from the river and wait for the sediment to precipitate itself before it was fit for use. Fifty-six miles were logged for the day's row.

In the morning Joe Eckel's Bar was alive with geese and ducks, cackling a l.u.s.ty farewell as I pushed through the drift stuff and resumed my voyage down the swelling river.

The reaches were usually five miles in length, though some of them were very much longer. Sometimes deposits of sand and vegetable matter will build up a small island adjacent to a large one, and then a dense thicket of cotton-wood brush takes possession of it, and a.s.sists materially in resisting the encroachments of the current. These little, low islands, covered with thickets, are called tow-heads, and the maps of the Engineer Corps of the United States distinguish them from the originally numbered islands in the following manner: "Island No. 18," and "Tow Head of Island No.18."

In addition to the numbered islands, which commence with Island No. 1, below the mouth of the Ohio, and end with Island No. 125, above the inlet to Bayou La Fourche, in Louisiana, there are many which have been named after their owners. During one generation a planter may live upon a peninsula comprising many thousand acres, with his cotton- fields and houses fronting on the Mississippi. The treacherous current of this river may suddenly cut a new way across his estate inland at a distance of two miles from his home. As the gradual change goes on, he looks from the windows of his house upon a new scene. He no longer has the rapid flowing river, enlivened by the pa.s.sage of steamboats and other craft; but before him is a sombre bayou, or crescent-shaped lake, whose muddy waters are almost motionless. He was the proprietor of Needham's Point, he is now the owner of Needham's Island, and lives in the quiet atmosphere of the backwoods of Tennessee.

This day's row carried me past heavily-wooded sh.o.r.es, cotton-fields with some of the cotton still unpicked; past the limits of Missouri on the left side, and into the wild state of Arkansas at Island No. 21. I finally camped on Island No. 26, in a half submerged thicket, after a row of fifty-eight miles.

As there were many flat and shanty boats floating southward, I adopted a plan by means of which my dinners were frequently cooked with little trouble to myself or others. About an hour before noon I gazed about within the narrow horizon for one of those floating habitations, and rowing alongside, engaged in conversation with its occupants. The men would tell what success they had had in collecting the skins of wild animals (though silent upon the subject of pig-stealing), while the women would talk of the homes they had left, and sigh for the refinements and comforts of "city life," by which they meant their former existence in some small town on the upper river. While we were exchanging our budgets of information I would obtain the consent of the presiding G.o.ddess of the boat to stew my ambrosia upon her stove, the sneak-box floating the while alongside its tub-like companion.

Many a half hour was spent in this way; and, besides the comfort of a hot dinner, there were advantages afforded for the study of characters not to be found elsewhere.

These peculiar boats, so often encountered, found refuge in the frequent cut-offs behind the many islands of the river; for besides those islands which have been numbered, new ones are forming every year. At times, when the water is very high, the current will cut a new route across the low isthmus, or neck, of a peninsula, around which sweeps a long reach of the main channel, leaving the tortuous bend which it has deserted to be gradually filled up with snags, deposits of alluvium, and finally to be carpeted with a vegetable growth. In some cases, as the stream works away to the eastward or westward, it remains an inland crescent-shaped lake, numbers of which are to be found in the wilderness many miles from the parent stream. I have known the channel of the Mississippi to be shortened twenty miles during a freshet, and a steam-boat which had followed the great ox-bow bend in ascending the river, on its return trip shot through the new cut-off of a few hundred feet in length, upon fifteen feet of water where a fortnight before a forest had been growing.

The area of land on both sides of the Mississippi subjected to annual overflow, like the country surrounding the Nile, in Egypt, is very large. There are localities thirty or forty miles away from the river where the height of the overflow of the previous year is plainly registered upon the trunks of the trees by a coating of yellow mud, which sometimes reaches as high as a man's head. This great region possesses vast tracts of rich land, as well as millions of acres of low swamps and bayou bottoms.

The traveller, the hunter, the zologist, and the botanist can all find here in these rich river bottoms a ready reward for any inconveniences experienced on the route. Strange types of half- civilized whites, game enough to satisfy the most rapacious, beast and bird of peculiar species, and over all the immense forests of cypress, sweet-gums, Spanish-oaks, tulip-trees, sycamores, cotton-woods, white- oaks, &c., while the most delicate wild-flowers "waste their sweetness on the desert air." Across all this natural beauty the whisper of desolation casts a cloud, for here during most of the year arises the health-destroying malaria.

Upon the high lands the squatter builds his log cabin, and makes his clearing where the rich soil and warm sun a.s.sist his rude agricultural labors, and he is rewarded with a large crop of maize and sweet potatoes. These, with bacon from his herd of wandering pigs, give sustenance to his family of children, who, hatless and bonnetless, roam through the woods until the sun bleaches their hair to the color of flax. With tobacco, whiskey, and ammunition for himself, and an ample supply of snuff for his wife, he drags out an indolent existence; but he is the pioneer of American civilization, and as he migrates every few years to a more western wilderness, his lands are frequently occupied by a more intelligent and industrious cla.s.s, and his improvements are improved upon. The new-comer, with greater ambition and more ample means, raises cotton instead of corn, and depends upon the Ohio valley for a supply of that cereal.

Wednesday, January 5th, was a sunny and windy day. The Arkansas sh.o.r.es afforded me a protection from the wind as I rowed down towards Fort Pillow, which, according to the map of the United States Engineer Corps, is situated upon Chickasaw Bluff No. 1, though some writers and map-makers designate the Columbus Bluff, below the mouth of the Ohio, as the first Chickasaw Bluff. The site of Fort Pillow is about thirty feet above the water. It commands the low country opposite, and two reaches of the river for a long distance. A little below the fort, on the right bank of the river, was an extensive cotton-field, still white with the flossy cellulose. Here I landed under the shady trees, and gathered cotton, the result of peaceful labor. Truly had the sword been beaten into the ploughshare, and the spear into a pruning-hook, for above me frowned down Fort Pillow, the scene of the terrible negro ma.s.sacre in our late war. Now the same sun shone so brightly upon the graves scattered here and there, and warmed into life the harvest sown in peace.

At intervals I caught glimpses of negro cabins, with their clearings, and their little crops of cotton glistening in the sun. The island tow-heads and sand-bars were numerous, and in places the Mississippi broadened into lake-like areas, while the yellow current, now heavily charged with mud, arose in height every hour. The climate was growing delightful. It was like a June day in the northern states. Each soft breeze of the balmy atmosphere seemed to say, as I felt its strange, fascinating influence, "You are nearing the goal!" The shadows of the twilight found me safely ensconced behind the lower end of Island No.

33, where in the bayou between it and the Tennessee sh.o.r.e I lazily watched fair Luna softly emerging from the clouds, and lending to the grand old woods her tender light.

I proceeded southward the next day, rowing comfortably after having divested myself of all superfluous apparel. The negroes, on their one- horse plantations, gave a hearty hail as I pa.s.sed, but I noted here a feature I had remarked when upon my "Voyage of the Paper Canoe," on the eastern coast. It was the silence in which these people worked.

The merry song of the darky was no longer heard as in the "auld lang syne." Then he was the slave of a white master. Now he is the slave of responsibilities and cares which press heavily upon his heretofore unthinking nature. To-day he has a future IF he can make it.

During the day, a lone woman on a shanty-boat, which was securely fastened to an old stump, volunteered much information in regard "her man," and the money he expected to receive for the skins he had been collecting during the winter. She said he would get in New Orleans thirty-five cents apiece for his c.o.o.n-skins, one dollar for minks, and one dollar and a half each for beaver and otter skins. She informed me that the sunken country below Memphis, on the Arkansas side, was full of deer and bears.

By rowing briskly I was able to pa.s.s Memphis, the princ.i.p.al river port of Tennessee, at five o'clock in the afternoon. This flouris.h.i.+ng city is situated upon one of the Chickasaw bluffs, thirty feet above the river. At the base of the bluff a bed of sandstone projects into the water, it being the only known stratum of rock along the river between Cairo and the Gulf. From the Ohio River to Vicksburg, a distance of six hundred miles, it is a.s.serted that there is no other site for a commercial city: so Memphis, though isolated, enjoys this advantage, which has, in fact, made her the busy cotton-s.h.i.+pping port she is to- day. Her population is about forty thousand. As Memphis is connected by railroads with the towns and villages of all the back country, in addition to her water advantages, she may be called the business centre of an immense area of cultivated land. The view of the city from the river is striking. Her esplanade, several hundred feet in width, sweeps along the bluffs and is covered with large warehouses.

Pus.h.i.+ng steadily southward, I looked out anxiously for a good camping- ground for the night, feeling that a rest had been well earned, for I had rowed sixty-one miles that day. Soon after pa.s.sing Horn Lake Bend, the thickets of Crow Island attracted my attention, for along the muddy, crumbling bank the mast of a little sloop arose from the water, and a few feet inland the bright blaze of a camp-fire shone through the mists of evening. A cheery hail of; "I say, stranger, pull in, and tie up here," came from a group of three roughly-clad men, who were bending over the coals, busily engaged in frying salt pork and potatoes. The swift current forced me into an eddy close to the camp.

One of the men caught my painter, and drew me close under the lee of their roughly constructed sloop of about two tons' burden. When seated by the bright fire, "the boys" told me their history. They were out of work; so, investing sixty dollars in an old sloop, putting on board a barrel of pork, a barrel of flour, some potatoes, coffee, salt, and mola.s.ses, (which cargo was to last three months,) they started to cut canes in the canebrakes of White River, Arkansas. These canes were to be utilized as fis.h.i.+ng-poles, and being carefully a.s.sorted and fastened into bundles, were to be s.h.i.+pped to Cincinnati by steamer, and from there by rail to Cleveland, Ohio, where Mr. Farrar, their consignee, would dispose of them for the party. They had come down the Mississippi from Keokuk, Iowa, having left that place December 13th, and had experienced various delays, having several times been frozen up in creeks. They would be able to cut, during the winter, twenty- five thousand fis.h.i.+ng-rods, enough, one would think, to clear the streams of all the finny tribe. Mr. F. C. Stirling, of Painesville, Ohio, was the princ.i.p.al of the party, and I found him an unusually intelligent young man. He had pa.s.sed the previous winter alone upon White River in an experimental sort of way, and had succeeded in obtaining the finest lot of fis.h.i.+ng-rods that had ever been sent north.

There was so much to be talked about, and so many experiences in voyaging to be exchanged, that we decided to remain that night on Crow Island, as there was not much risk of. my being deluged by the pa.s.sing steamers, for it was evident that the steamboat channel hugged the bank of the opposite side of the river. I took ash.o.r.e chocolate, canned milk, white sugar, and some of the Hickman mince-pies, while the boys rolled logs of wood on to the fire, and buried potatoes in the hot ashes. Stirling went to work at bread-making, and putting his dough in one of those flat-bottomed, three-legged, iron-covered vessels, which my reader will now recognize as the bake-pan, or Dutch oven, placed it on the coals, and loaded its cover with hot embers.

The potatoes were soon baked, and possessed a mealiness not usually found in those served up by the family cook. Stirling's bread was a success, and my chocolate disappeared down the throats of the hearty western boys as fast as its scalding temperature would admit.

Stirling told me of his life during the previous winter in the swamps of White River. On one occasion, a steamer having lost her anchor near his locality, the captain of the boat offered to reward Stirling liberally if he would recover the lost property; so, while the captain was making his up-river trip, the Ohio boy worked industriously dredging for the cable. He found it; and under-running the heavy rope, raised it and the anchor. When the steamer returned to Beteley's Landing, Stirling delivered the anchor and coil of rope to the captain, who, intending to defraud the young man of the promised reward, ordered the mate to "cast off the lines." The gong had signalled the engineer to get under way, but not quick enough to escape the young salvage-owner, who grasped the coil of rope and dragged it ash.o.r.e, shouting to the captain, "You may keep your anchor, but I will keep your cable as salvage, to which I am ent.i.tled for my trouble in saving your property."

A few days later, Stirling, wis.h.i.+ng to know whether he could legally hold his salvage fees, paddled down to Bolivia, a small town in the state of Mississippi, to obtain legal advice in regard to the matter.

The white people referred him to a negro justice of the peace, whom they a.s.sured him "had more law-larnin' than any white man in the diggings, and is the honestest n.i.g.g.e.r in these parts." Being ushered into the presence of a dignified negro, the cutter of fis.h.i.+ng-poles informed the "justice" that he desired legal advice in a case of salvage.

"Dat's rite, dat's berry good, sah," said the negro; "now you jes' set rite down he'ar, and macadimize de case to me. I gibs ebery man justice--no turnin' to de rite or de leff hand."

Stirling stated the facts, the colored justice puckering up his s.h.i.+ny brow, and his whole countenance expressing perplexity. "I want to know," said the possessor of the cable, "whether I can legally hold on to the coil of rope; use it or sell it for my own benefit, without being sued by the captain, who broke his agreement with me."

The colored man attempted to consult a volume containing a digest of laws; but being an indifferent reader, he handed it to Stirling, saying, "Now you, sah, jes look froo de book and find de larnin' on de case." Having carefully consulted the book, Stirling declared he found nothing that covered the salvage question in regard to cables and anchors. "Nuffin at all? nuffin at all?" asked the justice, seriously.

"Now let me rest de case a moment fur perspection." As he pondered on a case which could not be decided by precedent, an idea seemed to lighten his sable features, for he straightened himself up and exclaimed, "Den I will gib you an opinion. Dis court will apply de common law ob de state ob Mississippi; and dis is it: 'What you hab, dat you keep!' DIS is de teachings ob de bar, de bench, and de code."

Having received this august opinion, Stirling paddled back in his dug- out canoe to the swamps of Arkansas, much amused, if not impressed, with the negro's simple method of successfully disposing of a case, so unlike the usual procrastinating customs which fetter the courts presided over by learned white men.

Early on the following day I left the camp of the Ohio boys, for their progress was a.s.sisted by a large sail, and it would have been impossible for me to have kept up with them. They also travelled by night as well as by day, keeping one man at the helm while the others slept. At the lower end of Crow Island I left the state of Tennessee and entered the confines of Mississippi, having Arkansas still on my right hand.

During part of the afternoon I accompanied a flatboat-man and his family as far as Island No. 60, where we ran into a little bayou for the night. There was a rowdy settlement here, and many rough fellows were in the streets, shouting and fighting; but as I entered the bayou after dark, and secreted myself in the half submerged swamp, no one knew of my being there: so I felt safe from insult. The owner of the flatboat with whom I had entered the bayou intended to fish for the settlement. He was an old trapper, and informed me that bears were still abundant in parts of Alabama. He said the Canada Goose bred in small numbers in the lakes of the back country. His experiences with human nature found expression in his advice to me when I parted from him the next morning. "Don't leave your boat alone for half an hour in these parts, stranger. n.i.g.g.e.rs is bad, and some white folks too."

Promising my new friend to look out for number one, I waved an adieu to him and his, and went on my solitary way.

CHAPTER VII.

DESCENT OF THE MISSISSIPPI TO NEW ORLEANS

A FLATBOAT BOUND FOR TEXAS.-- A FLAT-MAN ON RIVER PHYSICS.-- ADRIFT AND ASLEEP.-- SEEKING THE EARTH'S LITTLE MOON.-- VICKSBURGH.-- JEFFERSON DAVIS'S COTTON PLANTATION, AND ITS NEGRO OWNER.-- DYING IN HIS BOAT.-- HOW TO CIVILIZE CHINESE.-- A SWIM OF ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY MILES ON THE MISSISSIPPI.-- TWENTY-FOUR HOURS IN THE WATER.-- ARRIVAL IN THE CRESCENT CITY.

DURING the afternoon, while rowing out of the cut-off behind an island, I caught sight of a flatboat floating in the contour of a distant bend. There was something familiar in her appearance, and, as I drew nearer, I recognized the pile of nets, the rusty stove, and the civil but silent crew. She was the same flat which had left Hickman, Kentucky, the morning I had departed from that town with my basket of pies. This time the crew seemed like old friends. River life makes all men equal. A pleasant hail now greeted me, and the duck-boat was soon moored to the side of the flat. As we floated along with the current, sipping our coffee, the captain told me his history. The war had reduced him from affluence to poverty, and in order to support his family, he had built a scow and penetrated the weird waters of Reelfoot Lake, from which he was able, for several years, to supply the citizens of Hickman with excellent fish. The enterprise was a novelty at that time, and there being no compet.i.tion, he made four thousand dollars the first year. After that others went into the business, and it became profitless. His mind was now bent upon a new field. Hearing that the people of northern Texas were dest.i.tute of a regular fish-market, he had provisioned his flat for a winter's campaign, and intended floating with his men down to the mouth of Red River, where he would be towed by a steamer through the state of Louisiana to the northeastern end of Texas. There entering Caddo Lake, which is from fifty to sixty miles long, and where game, ducks, and fish abound, he would camp upon the sh.o.r.es and set his nets. The railroads which penetrated that section would afford means for the rapid distribution of his fish.