Prisoners of Chance | Page 2

weird, mysterious--stretches backward into the dim
twilight before tradition, its sole remaining record graven upon the
surface of the earth, vaguely guessed at by those who study graves;
their pathetic ending has long been pictured in our country's story as
occurring amid the shadows of that dreadful midnight upon the banks
of the Ocatahoola, when vengeful Frenchmen put them to the sword.
Whence they came, whether from fabled Atlantis, or the extinct Aztec
empire of the South, no living tongue can tell; whither fled their
remnant,--if remnant there was left to flee,--and what proved its
ultimate fate, no previous pen has written. Out from the darkness of the
unknown, scarcely more than spectral figures, they came, wrote their
single line upon the earth's surface, and vanished, kings and people
alike sinking into speechless oblivion.
That Geoffrey Benteen witnessed the tragic ending of this strange
people I no longer question; for I have compared his narrative with all
we moderns have learned regarding them, as recorded in the pages of
Parkman, Charlevoix, Du Pratz, and Duponceau, discovering nothing to
awaken the slightest suspicion that he dealt with other than what he saw.
More, I have traced with exactitude the route these fugitives followed
in their flight northward, and, although the features of the country are
greatly altered by settlements of nearly two hundred years, one may
easily discern evidence of this man's honesty. For me it is enough to
feel that I have stood beside the massive tomb of this mysterious
people--a people once opulent and powerful, the warriors of forgotten
battle-fields, the builders of lost civilizations, the masters of that
imperial domain stretching from the Red River of the North to the
sea-coast of the Carolinas; a people swept backward as by the wrath of
the Infinite, scourged by famine, decimated by pestilence, warred

against by flame, stricken by storm, torn asunder by vengeful enemies,
until a weakened remnant, harassed by the French sword, fled
northward in the night to fulfil the fate ordained of God, and finally
perished amid the gloomy shadows of the grim Ozarks, bequeathing to
the curious future neither a language nor a name.
But this I leave with Geoffrey Benteen, and turn to my own simpler
task, a review of the peculiar circumstances leading up to this narrative,
involving a brief chapter from the records of our Southwest.
The early history of the Province of Louisiana is so complicated by
rapid changes in government as to confuse the student, rendering it
extremely difficult to comprehend correctly the varied and conflicting
interests--aristocratic, official, and commercial--actuating her pioneer
colonists. The written records, so far as translated and published, afford
only a faint reflection of the varied characteristics of her peculiar,
changing population. The blue-eyed Arcadian of her western plateaus,
yet dreaming upon his more northern freedom; the royalist planter of
the Mississippi bottoms, proud of those broad acres granted him by
letters-patent of the King; the gay, volatile, passionate Creole of the
town, one day a thoughtless lover of pleasure, the next a truculent
wielder of the sword; the daring smugglers of Barataria, already rapidly
drifting into open defiance of all legal restraint; together with the quiet
market gardeners of the Côte-des-Allemands, formed a heterogeneous
population impossible to please and extremely difficult to control.
Varied as were these types, yet there were others, easy to name, but far
more difficult to classify in their political relationships--such as priests
of the Capuchin order; scattered representatives of Britain; sailors from
ships ever swinging to the current beside the levee; sinewy
backwoodsmen from the wilds of the Blue Ridge; naked savages from
Indian villages north and east; raftsmen from the distant waters of the
Ohio and Illinois, scarcely less barbarian than those with redder skin;
Spaniards from the Gulf islands, together with a negro population, part
slave, part free, nearly equal in point of numbers to all the rest.
And over all who was the master?

It would have been difficult at times to tell, so swiftly did change
follow change--Crozat, Law, Louis the Fifteenth, Charles the Third,
each had his turn; flag succeeded flag upon the high staff which, ever
since the days of Bienville, had ornamented the Place d'Armes, while
great merchants of Europe played the occupants of thrones for the
bauble of this far western province, whose heart, nevertheless,
remained forever faithful to sunny France.
As late as 1768 New Orleans contained scarcely more than three
thousand two hundred persons, a third of these being black slaves.
Sixty-three years previously Bienville had founded Louisiana Province,
making choice of the city site, but in 1763 it suited the schemes of him,
who ruled the destinies of the mother country, to convey the yet
struggling colony into the control of the King of Spain. It was fully two
years later before