Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844

The steamers had left off running below Bâton Rouge, so I resolved to leave my gig at New Orleans, procuring in its stead a sort of dearborn or railed cart, in which I packed the whole of my traps, consisting of a medley of blankets and axes, barrows and ploughshares, cotton shirts and cooking utensils. Upon the top of all this I perched myself; and those who had known me only three or four months previously as the gay and fashionable Mr Howard, one of the leaders of the ton, the deviser and proposer of fêtes, balls, and gaieties of all kinds, might well have laughed, could they have seen me half buried amongst pots and pans, bottles and bundles, spades and mattocks, and suchlike useful but homely instruments. There was nobody there to laugh, however, or to cry either. Tears were then scarce articles in New Orleans; for people had got accustomed to death, and their feelings were more or less blunted. But even had the yellow fever not been there, I doubt if any one would have laughed at me; there is too much sound sense amongst us. Our town beauties – ay, the most fashionable and elegant of them – think nothing of installing themselves, with their newly wedded husbands, in the aforesaid dearborns, and moving off to the far west, leaving behind them all the comforts and luxuries among which they have been brought up. Whoever travels in our backwoods, will often come across scenes and interiors such as the boldest romance writer would never dare to invent. Newly married couples, whose childhood and early youth have been spent in the enjoyment of all the superfluities of civilization, will buy a piece of good land far in the depths of forests and prairies, and found a new existence for themselves and their children. One meets with their dwellings in abundance – log-houses, consisting for the most part of one room and a small kitchen: on the walls of the former the horses' saddles and harness, and the husband's working clothes, manufactured often by the delicate hands of his lady; in one corner, a harp or a piano; on the table, perhaps, a few numbers of the North American or Southern reviews, and some Washington or New York papers. A strange mixture of wild and civilized life. It is thus that our Johnsons, our Livingstons, and Ranselaers, and hundreds, ay, thousands of families, our Jeffersons and Washingtons, commenced; and truly it is to be hoped, that the rising generation will not despise the custom of their forefathers, or reject this healthy means of renovating the blood and vigour of the community.

To return to my own proceedings. I got upon my dearborn, in order to leave as soon as possible the pestilential atmosphere of New Orleans; and I had just established myself amongst my goods and chattels, when Cæsar came running up in great exultation, with a new cloak which he had been so lucky as to find lying before the door of a deserted house in the suburb. I took hold of the infected garment with a pair of tongs, and pitched it as far as I was able from the cart, to the great dismay of Cæsar, who could not understand why I should throw away a thing which he assured me was well worth twenty dollars. We set off, and soon got out of the town. Not a living creature was to be seen as far as the eye could reach along the straight road. On the right hand side, the suburb of the Annunciation was enclosed in wooden palisades, upon which enormous bills were posted, containing proclamations by the mayor of the town, and headed with the word "Infected," in letters that could be read half a mile off. These proclamations, however, were unnecessary. New Orleans looked more like a churchyard than a city; and we did not meet five persons during the whole of our drive along the new canal road.

At the first plantation at which we halted, in order to give the horses a feed, gates and doors were all shut in our faces, and the hospitable owner of the house warned us to be off. As this warning was conveyed in the shape of a couple of rifle-barrels protruded through the jalousies, we did not think it advisable to neglect it. The reception was cheerless enough; but we came from New Orleans, and could expect no better one. Cæsar, however, dauntless as his celebrated namesake, jumped over a paling, and plucked an armful of Indian corn ears, which he gave to the horses; an earthen pan served to fetch them water from the Mississippi, and after a short pause we resumed our journey. Five times, I remember, we halted, and were received in the same humane and hospitable manner, until at last we reached the plantation of my friend Bankes. We had come fifty miles under a burning sun, and had passed more than fifty plantations, each with its commodious and elegant villa built upon it; but we had not yet seen a human face. Here, however, I hoped to find shelter and refreshment; but in that hope I was doomed to be disappointed.

"From New Orleans?" enquired the voice of my friend through the jalousies of his verandah.

"To be sure," answered I.

"Then begone, friend, and be d – d to you!" was the affectionate reply of the worthy Mr Bankes, who was, nevertheless, kind enough to cause a huge ham and accessories, together with half a dozen well-filled bottles, to be placed outside the door – a sort of mute intimation that he was happy to see us, so long as we did not cross his threshold. I had a hearty laugh at this half-and-half hospitality, eat and drank, wrapped myself in a blanket, and slept, with the blue vault for a covering, as well or better than the president.

In the morning, before starting, I shouted out a "Thank ye! and be d – d to you!" by way of remerciment; and then we resumed our march.

At last, upon the third evening, we managed to get our heads under a roof at the town of Bâton Rouge, in the house of an old French soldier, who laughed at the yellow fever as he had formerly done at the Cossacks and Mamelukes; and the following morning we started for the Red River, in the steamboat Clayborne. By nightfall we reached my domain.

Santa Virgen! exclaims the Spaniard in his extremity of grief and perplexity: what I exclaimed, I am sure I do not remember; but I know that my hair stood on end, when I beheld, for the first time, the so-called improvements on my new property. The habitable and comfortable house was a species of pigsty, built out of the rough branches of trees, without doors, windows, or roof. There was I to dwell, and that in a season when the thermometer was ranging between ninety-five and a hundred degrees. The very badness of things, however, stimulated us to exertion; we set to work, and in two days had built a couple of very decent huts, the only inconvenience of which was, that when it rained hard, we were obliged to take refuge under a neighbouring cotton-tree. Fortunately, out of the two thousand acres, there really were fifty in a state of cultivation, and that helped us. I planted and kept house as well as I could: in the daytime I ploughed and sowed; and in the evening I mended the harness and the holes in my inexpressibles. With society I was little troubled, seeing that my nearest neighbour lived five-and-twenty miles off. The first summer passed in this manner; the second was a little better; and the third better still – until at last the way of life became endurable. There is nothing in the world impracticable; and Napoleon never spoke a truer word than when he said, "Impossible! – C'est le mot d'un fou!"

And then a hunting-party in the savannahs of Louisiana or Arkansas!

There is a something in those endless and gigantic wildernesses which seems to elevate the soul, and to give to it, as well as to the body, an increase of strength and energy. There reign, in countless multitudes, the wild horse and the bison; the wolf, the bear, and the snake; and, above all, the trapper, surpassing the very beasts of the desert in wildness – not the old trapper described by Cooper, who never saw a trapper in his life, but the real trapper, whose adventures and mode of existence would furnish the richest materials for scores of romances.

Our American civilization has engendered certain corrupt off-shoots, of which the civilization of other countries knows nothing, and which could only spring up in a land where liberty is found in its greatest development. These trappers are for the most part outcasts, criminals who have fled from the chastisement of the law, or else unruly spirits to whom even the rational degree of freedom enjoyed in the United States has appeared cramping and insufficient. It is perhaps fortunate for the States, that they possess the sort of fag-end to their territory comprised between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains; for much mischief might be caused by these violent and restless men, were they compelled to remain in the bosom of social life. If, for example, la belle France had had such a fag-end or outlet during the various crises that she has passed through in the course of the last fifty years, how many of her great warriors and equally great tyrants might have lived and died trappers! And truly, neither Europe nor mankind in general would have been much the worse off, if those instruments of the greatest despotism that ever disguised itself under the mask of freedom – the Massenas, and Murats, and Davousts, and scores more of suchlike laced and decorated gentry – had never been heard of.

One finds these trappers or hunters in all the districts extending from the sources of the Columbia and Missouri, to those of the Arkansas and Red Rivers, and on the tributary streams of the Mississippi which run eastward from the Rocky Mountains. Their whole time is passed in the pursuit and destruction of the innumerable wild animals, which for hundreds and thousands of years have bred and multiplied in those remote steppes and plains. They slay the buffalo for the sake of his hump, and of the hide, out of which they make their clothing; the bear to have his skin for a bed; the wolf for their amusement; and the beaver for his fur. In exchange for the spoils of these animals they get lead and powder, flannel shirts and jackets, string for their nets, and whisky to keep out the cold. They traverse those endless wastes in bodies several hundreds strong, and have often desperate and bloody fights with the Indians. For the most part, however, they form themselves into parties of eight or ten men, a sort of wild guerillas. These must rather be called hunters than trappers; the genuine trapper limiting himself to the society of one sworn friend, with whom he remains out for at least a year, frequently longer; for it takes a considerable time to become acquainted with the haunts of the beaver. If one of the two comrades dies, the other remains in possession of the whole of their booty. The mode of life that is at first adopted from necessity, or through fear of the laws, is after a time adhered to from choice; and few of these men would exchange their wild, lawless, unlimited freedom, for the most advantageous position that could be offered them in a civilized country. They live the whole year through in the steppes, savannahs, prairies, and forests of the Arkansas, Missouri, and Oregon territories – districts which comprise enormous deserts of sand and rock, and, at the same time, the most luxuriant and beautiful plains, teeming with verdure and vegetation. Snow and frost, heat and cold, rain and storm, and hardships of all kinds, render the limbs of the trapper as hard, and his skin as thick, as those of the buffalo that he hunts; the constant necessity in which he finds himself of trusting entirely to his bodily strength and energy, creates a self-confidence that no peril can shake – a quickness of sight, thought, and action, of which man in a civilized state can form no conceptions. His hardships are often terrible; and I have seen trappers who had endured sufferings, compared to which the fabled adventures of Robinson Crusoe are mere child's play, and whose skin had converted itself into a sort of leather, impervious to every thing except lead and steel. In a moral point of view, these men may be considered a psychological curiosity: in the wild state of nature in which they live, their mental faculties frequently develop themselves in a most extraordinary manner; and in the conversation of some of them may be found proofs of a sagacity and largeness of views, of which the greatest philosophers of ancient or modern times would have no cause to be ashamed.

The daily and hourly dangers incurred by these trappers must, one would think, occasionally cause them to turn their thoughts to a Supreme Being; but such is not the case. Their rifle is their god – their knife their patron saint – their strong right hand their only trust. The trapper shuns his fellow-men; and the glance with which he measures the stranger whom he encounters on his path, is oftener that of a murderer than a friend: the love of gain is as strong with him as it is found to be in a civilized state of society, and the meeting of two trappers is generally the signal for the death of one of them. He hates his white competitor for the much-prized beaver skins far more than he does his Indian one: the latter he shoots down as coolly as if he were a wolf or a bear; but when he drives his knife into the breast of the former, it is with as much devilish joy as if he felt he were ridding mankind of as great an evil-doer as himself. The nourishment of the trapper, consisting for years together of buffalo's flesh – the strongest food that a man can eat – and taken without bread or any other accompaniment, doubtless contributes to render him wild and inhuman, and to assimilate him in a certain degree to the savage animals by which he is surrounded.

During an excursion that I made with some companions towards the upper part of the Red River, we met with several of these trappers; amongst others, with one weather-beaten old fellow, whose face and bare neck were tanned by sun and exposure to the colour of tortoise-shell. We hunted two days in his company, without noticing any thing remarkable about the man; he cooked our meals, which consisted usually of a haunch of venison or a buffalo's hump, instructed us where to find game, and was aware of the approach of the latter even sooner than his huge wolf-dog, which never left his side. It was only on the morning of the third day, that we discovered something calculated to diminish our confidence in our new comrade. This was a number of lines and crosses upon the butt of his rifle, which gave us a new and not very favourable insight into the man's character. These lines and crosses came after certain words rudely scratched with a knife-point, and formed a sort of list, of which the following is a copy: —

Buffaloes – no number given, they being probably too numerous.

Bears, nineteen – the number being indicated by nineteen strait strokes.

Wolves, thirteen – marked by oblique strokes.

Red underloppers, four – marked by four crosses.

White underloppers, two – noted by two stars.

Whilst we were examining this curious calendar, and puzzling ourselves to make out the meaning of the word "underloppers," I observed a grim smile stealing over the features of the old trapper. He said nothing, however; drew the buffalo's hump he was cooking from under the hot embers, took it out of the piece of hide in which it was wrapped, and placed it before us. It was a meal that a king might have envied, and the mere smell of it made us forget the rifle butt. We had scarcely fallen to, when the old man laid hold of his gun.

"Look ye," said he, with a strange grin. "It's my pocket-book. D'ye think it a sin to kill one of them red or white underloppers?"

"Whom do you mean?" asked we.

The man smiled again and rose to depart; his look, however, was alone enough to enlighten us as to who the two-legged interlopers were whom he had first shot, and then noted on his rifle-butt with as much cool indifference as if they had been wild turkeys instead of human beings. In a region to which the vengeful arm of the law does not reach, we did not feel ourselves called upon or entitled to set ourselves up as judges, and we let the man go.

These trappers occasionally, and at long intervals, return for a few days or weeks to the haunts of civilization; and this occurs when they have collected a sufficient quantity of beaver skins. They then fell a hollow tree that stands on the shore of some navigable stream, make it water-tight, launch it, load it with their merchandise and their few necessaries, and float and row for thousands of miles down the Missouri, Arkansas, or Red River, to St Louis, Natchitoches, or Alexandria. They may be seen roaming and staring about the streets of these towns, clad in their coats of skins, and astonishing strangers by their wild and primitive appearance.

I was sitting on a sofa in a corner of the ladies' cabin, with Louise by my side, and talking over with her these and other recollections of more or less interest. The tea hour was long past, and the cabins were lighted up. Suddenly we were interrupted in our conversation by a loud noise overhead.

"A nigger killed!" sang out somebody upon deck.

"A nigger killed!" repeated two, ten, twenty, and at length a hundred voices; and thereupon there was a running and trampling, and hurrying and scurrying, an agitation in our big floating inn as if the boilers were on the brink of bursting, and giving us a passage into eternity in the midst of their scalding contents. Louise started up, and dragging me with her, hurried breathless through the two saloons, to the stairs leading upon deck.

"Who is killed? Where is the poor negro?"

The answer I got was a horse-laugh from a score of backwoodsmen.

"Much noise about nothing, dear Louise."

And we were on the point of descending the stairs again, when we were detained, and our attention riveted, by the picturesque appearance of the deck – I should rather say of the persons grouped upon it – seen in the red, flickering, and uncertain light of sundry lamps, lanterns, and torches. Truly, the night-piece was not bad. In the centre of the steamer's deck, at an equal distance from stem and stern, stood a knot of fellows of such varied and characteristic appearance as might be sought for in vain in any other country than ours. It seemed as if all the western states and territories had sent their representatives to our steamer. Suckers from Illinois, and Badgers from the lead-mines of Missouri – Wolverines from Michigan, and Buckeyes from Ohio – Redhorses from old Kentuck, and Hunters from Oregon, stood mingled before us, clad in all sorts of fantastical and outlandish attire. One had a hunting-shirt of blue and white striped calico, which made its wearer's broad back and huge shoulders resemble a walking feather-bed; another was remarkable for a brilliant straw-hat – a New Orleans purchase, that looked about as well on his bronzed physiognomy as a Chinese roof would do on a pigsty. Wiñebago wampum belts and Cherokee mocassins, jerkins of tanned and untanned deer-hide, New York frock-coats, and red and blue jackets, composed some of the numerous costumes, of which the mixture and contrast were in the highest degree picturesque.

In the middle of this group stood a personage of a very different stamp – a most interesting specimen of the genus Yankee, contrasting in a striking manner with the rough-hewn sons of Anuk who surrounded him. He was a man of some thirty years of age, as dry and tough as leather, of grave and pedantic mien, the skin of his forehead twisted into innumerable small wrinkles, his lips pressed firmly together, his bright reddish-grey eyes apparently fixed, but, in reality, perpetually shifting their restless glances from the men by whom he was surrounded, to some chests that lay upon the deck before him, and again from the chests to the men; his whole lean, bony, angular figure in a position that made it difficult to conjecture whether he was going to pray, or to sing, or to preach a sermon. In one hand he held a roll of pigtail tobacco, in the other some bright-coloured ribands, which he had taken from an open chest containing the manifold articles constituting the usual stock in trade of a pedlar. Beside this chest were two others, and beside those lay a negro, howling frightfully, and rubbing alternately his right shoulder and his left foot; but nevertheless, according to all appearance, by no means in danger of taking his departure for the other world. As the Yankee pedlar raised his hand and signed to the vociferous blackamoor to be silent, the face of the former gradually assumed that droll, cunning, and yet earnest expression which betrays those double distilled Hebrews, when they are planning to get possession, in a quasi-legal manner, of the dollars of their fellow-citizens; in a word, when they are manœuvering to exchange their worthless northern wares for the sterling coin of the south. Presently his arms began to swing about like those of a telegraph; he threw a long and loving glance at the two unopened chests, which had apparently slipped down from the top of a quantity of merchandise piled upon deck, and fallen on the foot and shoulder of the negro; then measuring the latter with a look of reproach, he suddenly opened his compressed lips, from which a sharp, high-toned, schoolmasterlike voice issued.

"Sambo, Sambo! What have you done? Sambo, Sambo!" he repeated, while his voice became more solemn, and he raised his hands and eyes as if appealing to heaven for justice. "Sambo, you onlucky nigger, what have you been a doin'?"

"A 'sarve,' a wonderful 'sarve!'" screamed the man, pointing to the chests with an appearance of the profoundest grief.

"Heaven forgive you, Sambo! but you have endangered, perhaps sp'iled, a 'sarve,' compared to which all the 'intments and balms of Mecca, Medina, and Balsora – of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, or whatever other places they may come from, air actilly no better than cart-grease. Ah, Sambo! if you were twenty times a nigger, and could be brought twenty times on the auction table, you wouldn't fetch enough money to pay for the harm you have done!"

"Boe! Boe!" howled the negro by way of parenthesis.

"Ah, Boe! Boe!" screamed the Yankee, "you may well say Boe, Boe! And you ain't the only one as may say it, that's sartain. There be ladies and gentlemen here, as respectable ladies and gentlemen as can be found any where – ay, even to Boston, the cradle of our independence – and they might say Boe! Boe! if they knew all. In them two chests are a hundred tin boxes and glass phials; and if only twenty of them are damaged, there is more injury done than your hide could pay for, if it were twenty times as thick and twenty times as vallyable as it is. Your whole carcass ain't worth one of the boxes of that precious 'intment. Ah, Sambo!"

"Boe! Boe!" howled Sambo in reply.

"What's the palaver about?" growled some of the Badgers and Buckeyes; "open the chests, and you'll see what harm's done."

"D'ye ye hear, Sambo?" cried the Yankee with the same immovable countenance; "you're to hold yer tongue, the gentlemen say; they're tired of yer noise, and no wonder. What's the use of boohooin' away at that rate? Helps you nothin'; you desarve what you've got. I'll thank you for your long knife, Mister. That'll do. That opens it, cuts in like rael steel; better it should be into hard word than soft flesh. There they are, then, and not broken; onhurt, without a spot or a crack. Sing praises to the Lord! psalms and hymns of rejoicin' – not a phial broke, nor a box smashed! Praised be the Lord! I say ag'in. Since they are safe, it don't matter if twenty shoulder-blades and ankle-bones are put out. Verily the mercy of Heaven shall be made manifest, and that by the means of a feeble vessel, Jared Bundle by name. Down with ye, Sambo – down with ye, I say! – Your shoulder and your dingy hide shall be made whole, and your black bones shall be comforted!"

Not a muscle of the Yankee's face moved; he preserved the grave and solemn appearance of a man to whom a sacred trust has been confided, and who is fully penetrated with the importance of his mission. Once or twice, however, I observed him give a keen but almost imperceptible glance around him, as if to observe the effect of his eloquence upon his auditors.

"Down with you, Sambo!" he repeated to the negro, who had got himself into a sort of sitting posture upon the deck.

"Down, down!" cried the men of Kentucky.

"Down!" those of Missouri and Ohio.

"Be quick about it!" shouted an Illinois sucker.

"Let's see the Yankee's wonderful cure!" exclaimed a hunter from Oregon.

And amidst shouts and exclamations and laughter, poor Sambo was seized by half a dozen of their bear's fists, and stretched out upon a heap of coffee-bags like a pig that's going to be killed.

"Boe! Boe!" clamoured the negro at the top of his voice.

"Boohoo as much as you like," cried the Yankee in a shrill tone, that was heard above all the howlings of the unlucky Sambo. "You'll sing to another tune when you see and understand and feel what a Conne'ticut man can do. You say Boe, Boe! like a poor benighted crittur as you are, but what do you say to that?" cried the pedlar in a triumphant voice, as he held close to the negro's nose a piece of linen rag on which he had smeared a green greasy substance bearing a strong resemblance to paste-blacking in a state of decomposition. Then, taking up the box which contained this precious compound, he put it in close proximity to the obtuse snout of the blackamoor, who made a grimace as if his olfactories were but moderately regaled by the odour emanating from the miraculous ointment.