Prisoners of Chance | Page 2

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 C?te-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 word of this unwelcome transfer reached the distant province, while as much more time elapsed ere Don Antonio de Ulloa, the newly appointed Spanish governor, landed at New Orleans, and, under guard of but two companies of infantry, took unto himself the reins. Unrest was already in the air,--petitions and delegations laden with vehement