PICTURES OF THE FAR WEST. I. LOOKING FOR CAMP. N that portion of the arid belt which lies within the borders of Idaho between the rich irrigated valleys and the mining-camps of the mountains there is a region whereon those who occupy it have never labored - the beautiful "hill-country," the lap of the mountain-ranges, the free pastures of the plains. Here, without help of hands, are sown and harvested the standing crops of wild grass which constitute the wealth of the cattle-men in the valleys. Of all the monotonous phases of the Western landscape these high, solitary pastures are the most poetic. Nothing human is suggested by the plains except processions of tired people passing over, tribal movements, war-parties, discoverers, and fortune-seekers. But the sentiment of the hills is restful. Their stillness is not lifeless; it is as if these warm-bosomed slopes were listening, like a mother to her child's breathing, for sounds from all the shy, wild communities which they feed and shelter the slow tread of grazing herds, the call of a bird, the rustle of the stiff grass on the hillslopes, the lapsing trickle of water in gulches hidden by willows, and traced by their winding green from far off across the dry slopes. All the life of the hills tends downwards at night; the cattle, which always graze upwards, go down to the gulches to drink; the hunter makes his camp there when darkness overtakes him. He may travel late over the hills in the twilight, prolonged and colored by the sunset. There is seldom a cloud to vary the slow, deep gradation where the sun has gone down and the dusty valley still smolders in orange and crimson, with a cold substratum of pale blue mist above the river channel. Through a break in the line of the hills, or from a steep rise, one can track the sun from setting to setting till he is gone at last, and the flaming sky colors the opposite hilltops so that they glow even after the rising moon casts shadows. At this hour the stillness is so intense that the faintest breeze can be heard, creeping along the hillslopes and stirring the dry, reed-like grasses with a sound like that of a muted string. SING EVENING AMONG THE FOOT-HILLS. ING of the valley and plain that toil has made fertile and green, Sing of the worshipful mountains where heavenly presences lean, But slight not the friendly low hills that offer glad service between. Their raiment is tufted wild grass, warm-colored like harvest-time wheat,— Here is the fold that gathers at evening the far-ranging herd; The willows have taken the wood-dove and lark to watch and to ward; The partridge is safe, nestled down in the warm, dry, moon-silvered sward That, moved by the soft night wind, wakes the sound of a muted chord. Follow thou too, O hunter! tired of the sun and the height; Come, tracing thy way by the flame that is loath to die out of the west; Edith M. Thomas. VOL. XXXVII.-16. STRANGE TRUE STORIES OF LOUISIANA. BY GEORGE W. CABLE, Author of "The Grandissimes," "Bonaventure," etc. I. 1888. HOW I GOT THEM. RUE stories are not often good art. The relations and experiences of real men and women rarely fall in such symmetrical order as to make an artistic whole. Until they have had such treatment as we give stone in the quarry or gems in the rough they seldom group themselves with that harmony of values and brilliant unity of interest that result when art comes in-not so much to transcend nature as to make nature transcend herself. Yet I have learned to believe that good stories happen oftener than once I thought they did. Within the last few years there have dropped into my hands by one accident or another a number of these natural crystals, whose charms, never the same in any two, are in each and all enough at least to warn off all tampering of the fictionist. Happily, moreover, without being necessary one to another, they yet have a coherent sequence, and follow one another like the days of a week. They are mine only by right of discovery. From various necessities of the case I am sometimes the story-teller, and sometimes, in the reader's interest, have to abridge; but I add no fact and trim naught of value away. Here are no "restorations," not one. In time, place, circumstance, in every essential feature, I give them as I got them-strange stories that truly happened, all partly, some wholly, in Louisiana. In the spring of 1883, being one night the guest of my friend Dr. Francis Bacon, in New Haven, Connecticut, and the conversation turning, at the close of the evening, upon wonderful and romantic true happenings, he said: "You are from New Orleans; did you never hear of Salome Müller ? " "No." Thereupon he told the story, and a few weeks later sent me by mail, to my home in New Orleans, whither I had returned, a transcription, which he had most generously made, of a brief summary of the case-it would be right to say tragedy instead of case-as printed in "The Law Reporter " some forty years ago. That transcription lies before me now, beginning, "The Supreme Court of the State of Louisiana has lately been called upon to investigate and decide one of the most interesting cases which has ever come under the cognizance of a judicial tribunal." This episode, which had been the cause of public excitement within the memory of men still living on the scene, a native resident of New Orleans and student of its history stumbled upon for the first time nearly two thousand miles from home. I mentioned it to a number of lawyers of New Orleans, one after another. None remembered ever having heard of it. I appealed to a former chief-justice of the State, who had a lively personal remembrance of every member of the bench and the bar concerned in the case; but of the case he had no recollection. One of the medical experts called in by the court for evidence upon which the whole merits of the case seemed to hang was still living - the distinguished Creole physician Dr. Armand Mercier. He could not recall the matter until I recounted the story, and then only in the vaguest way. Yet when my friend the former chief-justice kindly took down from his shelves and beat free of dust the right volume of supreme court decisions, there was the terse, cold record, No. 5623. I went to the old newspaper files under the roof of the city hall and had the pleasure speedily to find, under the dates of 1818 and 1844, such passing allusions to the strange facts of which I was in search as one might hope to find in those days when a serious riot was likely to receive no mention, and a steamboat explosion dangerously near the editorial rooms would be recorded in ten lines of colorless statement. I went to the courts, and after following and abandoning several false trails through two days' search, found that the books of record containing the object of my quest had been lost, having unaccountably disappeared in-if I remember aright-1870. There was one chance left; it was to find the original papers. I employed an intelligent gentleman at so much a day to search till he should find them. In the dusty garret of one of the court buildings-the old Spanish Ca bildo that faces Jackson Square-he rummaged for ten days, finding now one desired document and now another, until he had gathered all but one. Several he drew out of a great heap of papers lying in the middle of the floor, as if it were a pile of rubbish; but this one he never found. Yet I was content. Through the perseverance of this gentleman and the intervention of a friend in the legal profession, and by the courtesy of the court, I held in my hand the whole forgotten story of the poor lost and found Salome Müller. How through the courtesy of some of the reportorial staff of the "New Orleans Picayune" I found and conversed with three of Salome's still surviving relatives and friends, I shall not stop to tell. WHILE I was still in search of these things the editor of the "New Orleans Times-Democrat" handed me a thick manuscript, asking me to examine and pronounce upon its merits. It was written wholly in French, in a small, cramped, feminine hand. I replied, when I could, that it seemed to me unfit for the purposes of transient newspaper publication, yet if he declined it I should probably buy it myself. He replied that he had already examined it and decided to decline it, and it was only to know whether I, not he, could use it that I had been asked to read it. I took it to an attorney, and requested him, under certain strict conditions, to obtain it for me with all its rights. "What is it?" "It is the minute account, written by one of the travelers, a pretty little Creole maiden of seventeen, of an adventurous journey made in 1795 from New Orleans through the wilds of Louisiana, taking six weeks to complete a tour that could now be made in less than two days." "But this is written by some one else; see, it says, 'Voyage de ma Grand'mère.'" "Yes, it purports to be a copy. We must have the little grandmother's original manuscript, written in 1822; that or nothing." So a correspondence sprang up with a gentle and refined old Creole lady with whom I later had the honor to become acquainted and now count among my esteemed friends-granddaughter of the grandmother who, after innumerable recountings by word of mouth to mother, sisters, brothers, friends, husband, children, and children's children through twentyseven years of advancing life, sat down at last and wrote the ofttold tale for her little grandchildren, one of whom, inheriting her literary instinct and herself become an aged grandmother, discovers the manuscript among some old family papers and recognizes its value. The first exchange of letters disclosed the fact that the "New Orleans Bee" ("L'Abeille") had bought the right to publish the manuscript in French; but the moment its editors had proper assurance that there was impending another arrangement more profitable to her, they chivalrously yielded all they had bought, on merely being reimbursed. The condition that required the delivery of the original manuscript, written over sixty years before, was not so easily met. First came the assurance that its spelling was hideous, its writing bad and dimmed by time, and the sheets tattered and torn. Later followed the disclosure that an aged and infirm mother of the grandmother owned it, and that she had some time before compelled its return to the private drawer from which the relic-loving daughter had abstracted it. Still later came a letter saying that since the attorney was so relentlessly exacting, she had written to her mother praying her to part with the manuscript. Then followed another communication,-six large, closely written pages of despair, inclosing a letter from the mother. The wad of papers, always more and more in the way and always "smelling bad," had been put into the fire. But a telegram followed on the heels of the mail, crying joy! An old letter had been found and forwarded which would prove that such a manuscript had existed. But it was not in time to intercept the attorney's letter saying that, the original manuscript being destroyed, there could be no purchase or any need of further correspondence. The old letter came. It was genuine beyond a doubt, had been written by one of the party making the journey, and was itself forty-seven years old. The paper was poor and sallow, and the orthography!"Ma bien chair niaice je ressoit ta lette ce mattin," etc. But let us translate: st. john baptist1 10 august 1836 MY VERY DEAR NIECE. I received your letter this morning in which you ask me to tell you what I remember of the journey to Attakapas made in 1795 by papa, M. -, [and] my younger sister Françoise afterward your grandmother. If it were with my tongue I could answer more favorably; but writing is not my forte; I was never calculated for a public writer, as your grandmother was. By the way, she wrote the journey, and very prettily; what have you done with it? It is a pity to lose so pretty a piece of writing. . . . We left New Orleans to go to the Attakapas in the month of May, 1795, and in an old barge [“ vieux chalant qui senté le rat mord a plien nez"]. We were Françoise and I Suzanne, pearl of the family, and Papa, who went to buy lands; and 1 Name of the parish, or county. one Joseph Charpentier and his dear and pretty little wife Alix [whom] I love so much; 3 Irish, father mother and son [fice]; lastly Mario, whom you knew, with Celeste, formerly lady's maid to Marianne- who is now my sister-in-law. . . . If I knew better how to write I would tell you our adventures the alligators tried to devour us. We barely escaped perishing in Lake Chicot and many other things. At last we arrived at a pretty village St. Martinville called also little Paris and full of barons, marquises, counts and countesses1 that were an offense to my nose and my stomach. your grandmother was in raptures. it was there we met the beautiful Tonton, your aunt by marriage. I have a bad finger and must stop. . . . Your loving aunty [ta tantine qui temme] Suzanne - née The kind of letter to expect from one who as a girl of eighteen could shoot and swim and was called by her father "my son"; the antipode of her sister Françoise. The attorney wrote that the evidence was sufficient. His letter had hardly got into the mail-bag when another telegram cried hold! that a few pages of the original manuscript had been found and forwarded by post. They came. They were only nine in all-old, yellow, ragged, torn, leaves of a plantation accountbook whose red-ruled columns had long ago faded to a faint brown, one side of two or three of them preoccupied with charges in bad French of yards of cottonade, "mouslin à dames," "jaconad," dozens of soap, pounds of tobacco, pairs of stockings, lace, etc.; but to our great pleasure each page corresponding closely, save in orthography and syntax, with a page of the new manuscript, and the page numbers of the old running higher than those of the new! Here was evidence which one could lay before a skeptical world that the transcriber had not expanded the work of the original memoirist. The manuscript passed into my possession, our Creole lady-correspondent reiterating to the end her inability to divine what could be wanted with "an almost illegible scrawl" (griffonage), full of bad spelling and of rather inelegant diction. But if old manuscript was the object of desire, why, here was something else; the very document alluded to by Françoise in her memoir of travel-the autobiography of the dear little countess, her beloved Alix de Morainville, made fatherless and a widow by the guillotine in the Reign of Terror. "Was that all?" inquired my agent, craftily, his suspicions aroused by the promptness with which the supply met the demand. "Had she not other old and valuable manuscripts ?" 1 Royalist refugees of '93. "No, alas! only that one." Thus reassured, he became its purchaser. It lies before me now, in an inner wrapper of queer old black paper, beside its little tightfitting bag or case of a kind of bright, largeflowered silken stuff not made in these days, and its outer wrapper of old, discolored briefpaper; a pretty little document of sixty-eight small pages in a refined feminine hand, perfect in its slightly archaic grammar, gracefully composed, and, in spite of its flimsy yellowed paper, as legible as print: "Histoire d'Alix de Morainville écrite à la Louisiane ce 22 Aout 1795Pour mes chères amies, Suzanne et Françoise Bossier." One day I told the story to Professor Charles Eliot Norton of Harvard University. He generously offered to see if he could find the name of the Comte de Morainville on any of the lists of persons guillotined during the French Revolution. He made the search, but wrote, "I am sorry to say that I have not been able to find it either in Prudhomme,' Dictionnaire des Individues envoyés à la Mort judiciairement, 1789-1796,' or in the list given by Wallon in the sixth volume of his very interesting Histoire du Tribunal Revolutionnaire de Paris.' Possibly he was not put to death in Paris," etc. And later he kindly wrote again that he had made some hours' further search, but in vain. Here was distress. I turned to the little manuscript roll of which I had become so fond and searched its pages anew for evidence of either genuineness or its opposite. The wrapper of black paper and the close-fitting silken bag had not been sufficient to keep it from taking on the yellowness of age. It was at least no modern counterfeit. Presently I noticed the total absence of quotation marks from its passages of conversation. But at the close of the last century, as I understand, quotation marks were just beginning to come into use. Their entire absence from a manuscript of sixty-eight pages abounding in conversations meant either age or cunning pretense. But would the pretender carry his or her cunning to the extreme of fortifying the manuscript in every possible way against the sallowing touch of time, lay it away in a trunk of old papers, lie down and die without mentioning it, and leave it for some one in the second or third generation afterward to find? I turned the leaves once more, and lo! one leaf that had had a large corner torn off had lost that much of its text; it had been written upon before it was torn; while on the other torn leaf, for there are two, the writing reads-as you shall see-uninterruptedly around the torn edge; the writing has been done after the corner was torn off. The manuscript is |