UNITED STATES IN THE VALLEY OF THE MISSISSIPPI.

47.

contained 8,000, Mobile 800; the proportion is now sustained, Pensacola 404; upper Louisiana 6,028. The commerce of New Orleans extended to all the west, and to the eastern states, and Europe. Its river trade employed five hundred flat boats. The cotton crop of 1802, was 20,000 bales of 300 lbs. ; sugar, 5,000 hhds. ; indigo, 3,000 lbs. A dozen stills were producing taffia, from molasses; a sugar refinery in the city produced 20,000 lbs. of loaf sugar. Exports of 1802, 50,000 bbls. of flour; 3,000 bbls. of salt beef and pork; 2,000 hhds. of tobacco; 34,000 bales of cotton; 4,000 hhds. of 800 casks of molasses.*

sugar; and

The second volume of Dr. Monette's history is entitled, the UNITED STATES IN THE VALLEY OF THE MISSISSIPPI. For all practical purposes, it is the most valuable of the two, and constitutes the only history of this period, taken in a comprehensive whole. The space occupied is between 1775 and 1846; an introductory chapter being appended, upon the manners and customs of the frontier population. It is illustrated with a map of Texas in 1836; a later one would have been much more desirable, though this is sufficient for general purposes. The Rio Grande appears upon it as the boundary as far as 29° 30′ N. latitude, where the line strikes N. E. toward the Guadaloupe mountains, along which it is thence drawn. Texas being considered by Dr. Monette, justly, as originally included in Louisiana, accounts for the appearance of the map. The first volume, we ought to have observed, contains two other maps, showing the limits of Louisiana in 1740; of Florida, and of the British American colonies and the country around the lakes, at a still more remote period.

We cannot take up the American portion of the history of the Mississippi valley, without feeling that we have approached an epoch of great events and of signal triumphs of our republican policy. Hemmed in by a chain of mountains and by the sea, it was conceived at the period of the revolution, by some of the best thinkers, that the Atlantic republics were too numerous and scattered, even then, to present other than discordant elements, and require a less powerful government than centralism itself. Could they have supposed that the barriers of the mountains were to be overleaped, even while their doubts were fresh upon their lips; that the allied or confederated republics would spring up, far as the remote west could trace them; that they would scale the Rocky mountains, and intermingle with the Chinese on the Pacific shores, or claim the Sandwich Islanders for their neighbors; that the shores of the South seas and the Gulf of California would receive their councils from the cabinets at Washington; and Mexico herself present a feeble barrier to their interminable progress. The allied republics, doubling, and even increasing three-fold their numbers, and yet "one, like the wave!" A single state in the valley of the Mississippi, unexplored at the period of the revolution, with a population equal nearly to that of the then thirteen colonies combined; a single city more populous than all the Atlantic cities together, at the same epoch; and these results in the memory and experience of men who have lived through them all. Such is the Valley of the Mississippi!

However, for reflections of this sort we shall have abundant space * Monette's Valley of the Mississippi, vol. I., p. 566.

hereafter, when, having completed the Civil history, we take up the Statistical, of wealth, population, progress and prospects.

The domestic life of the western pioneers combined, it may be imagined, simplicity and wildness. The hunting-shirt, the leggins, and breech-cloth and moccasons, borrowed from the Indians, were a common attire. The dwellings were log pens in squares, with a door, and often the luxury of a window. A plastering of clay and the usual smoky chimney and dirt floor, and we were about to say, squalling children; but of this history has no mention. But then the mechanic and the merchant comes, and how soon these log-cabin comforts are gone forever!

As soon as the mechanic and merchant appeared, sashes with two or four lights of glass might be seen set into gaps cut through the side logs. Cotemporaneously, old barrels began to constitute the tops of chimneys, and joists and plank, sawed by hand, took the place of puncheons.

At first log cabins were built in villages or clusters, and surrounded with stockades formed by logs set upright in the ground, and made bullet-proof for mutual protection against Indian surprise and massacre.

The inside appearance of a frontier habitation was also unique, and adapted to the circumstances of the times. Bureaus, side-boards, and armors were unknown, and so were their uses. The whole furniture of a room consisted of one homemade bedstead, and one trundle bedstead under it for children, both well furnished with bear skins and buffalo robes instead of blankets; a few split-bottomed chairs, and a few three-legged stools, a small movable bench or table, supported by two pairs of cross-legs, for the family meals; a shelf and water-bucket near the door. The naked wood and clay walls, instead of the ornamental paper and tapestry of the cities, were embellished with the whole wealth of the family wardrobe. The frocks, dresses, and bed-gowns of the women, the hunting-shirts, pantaloons, and arms of the men, all were suspended around the walls from wooden hooks and pegs, and served as a good index to the industry and neatness of the mistress of the house. The cooking utensils and table furniture consisted of a few iron pots, pewter plates and dishes," spoons, knives and forks, which had been transported from the east with their salt and iron; besides these, a few wooden bowls, or "trenchers," "noggins and gourds," completed the list of cooking and eating utensils.*

44

The chase fed and clothed these hardy woodmen, and they had always in the rude larder good stock of such wild flesh and fow! as their progeny might contemplate with watery mouth, and sigh for at this day in vain. The pheasant and the opossum have verily degenerated since then. Who would eat a domesticated or civilized rabbit, smoke-dried and rank with the greasy odors of steam and machinery? And then the "journey cake;" or, not to be pedantic about the matter, familiar "Johnny cake." How benignant has been our household deities in preserving to us this relic of olden time! It might have been lost in tradition, or corrupted like the arts of Egypt or of Greece. But no: it smokes yet by the cheerful embers— not in your dashing marble columned mansion, to be sure, but in your good old-fashioned chimneys of the Carolinas and Virginia. Who but would write the praise of "Johnny cake," and teach the excellent proportions which go to make it up? Refine not too much your meal, good Mrs. Cook, and see that the salt be sprinkled with a sparing hand. Let not the heat too intensely reach it by the hearth. Now softly turned that there be not too much crisp, and that either side have a like show of brownness. Pass under the knife to the board, and while yet the smoke passes, ply softly the new-churned butter. But

* Monette's Valley of the Mississippi, Vol. II. p. 6.

EARLY MANNERS IN THE WEST.

49

who can teach the rationale of " Johnny cake?" Your books are worthless. It can be made nowhere than on these old hearths we commemorate. Send your special agents to teach the starving Irish the virtues of corn meal, as many as you please; they do not know these virtues themselves. Old Nanny, who watched our boyhoodheaven praise her at our fondly remembered homestead, can give a better lesson on the merits and modus preparandi of "Johnny cake" than them all. Their blunders would shock her- these vaunting commissioners of frying-pans and dough-boards! But we are growing epicurean and no wonder, as we write in the far East, where Indian meal is worked up into such villanous compounds. Dr. Monette celebrates the "hog and hommony " too, of those days of yore --the great staples with which the Western granaries and porkeries" are feeding the world. We adopt the " We adopt the hommony," but waugh the "hog!" Our voice is still about the "hog "-your gross We will have none of him. "But a young and tender suckling, his voice as yet not broken, but something between a childish treble and a grumble-the mild forerunner or præludium of a grunt." "See him in the dish (every one will recognize Charles Lamb), his second cradle, how meek he lieth!-wouldst thou have had this innocent grow up to the grossness and indocility which too often accompany maturer swinehood? Ten to one he would have proved a glutton, a sloven, an obstinate, disagreeable animal-wallowing in all manner of filthy conversation-from these sins he is happily snatched away

con !"

Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade
Death came with timely care-

"ba

his memory is odoriferous- no clown curseth, while his stomach half rejecteth, the rank bacon - no coal-heaver bolteth him in reeking sausages he hath a fair sepulchre in the grateful stomach of the judicious epicure- and for such a tomb might be content to die."

But this people began to aspire to other luxuries than hog and hommony and peltry clothes, well as these might be in their way. A caravan set out annually for the east of the mountains, with furs, &c., for barter. The caravan consisted of several men with horses and pack-saddles and pouches of shelled corn; and thus they passed to Baltimore or to Frederick. Here salt, nails, iron, pewter plates and dishes were the equivalent for hides, ginseng, snake root and bearsgrease. A barrel of salt was worth a cow and a calf in the West.

And then the administration of justice. My Lord Chief-Justice of the King's Bench could not have presided with more dignity than him of Oyer, Terminer, instanter, memory, under his forest canopyLynch !

Night was the season for their official acts. Chief-Justice "Birch" established his tribunal under a forest canopy; before him the culprit was arraigned, and with form and ceremony tried, and, as a matter of course, convicted. Sentence was pronounced, and without delay the penalty was inflicted without stint or mercy. Tied securely to a tree, he was made to feel the rod, dealt by many sturdy hands, until justice was satisfied. If perchance he were an old offender,

There has lately appeared two works from the press, entitled "Indian Meal," and "The Pig." The reader may have some use for them. They have not yet come to our hands.

VOL. IV.-4

or had claims to the title of a "British Tory," his wounds were dressed, not with oil and wine, but with "tar and feathers." As the culprit retired from this ordeal, he was informed by Judge Lynch that the operation would be repeated in a few If there were condays unless he withdrew from the jurisdiction of the court. federates in crime, this warning served for all.

This tribunal was resorted to only in extreme cases; and although liable to occasional abuse, it was a great protection to honest people against the most abandoned intruders, who defied the usual forms of law.*

The life of the boatmen, that hardy and unique class which soon formed itself on the western rivers, and exists to the present day, to a certain extent, is graphically delineated by Dr. Monette. We make

an extract:

Steam had not exerted its magic influence on the western waters, and the rich cargoes which ascended the Mississippi in keel-boats and barges were propelled by human labor for nearly two thousand miles, slowly advancing against the strong current of these rivers. The boatmen, with their bodies naked to the waist, spent the long and tedious days traversing the "running board," and pushing with their whole force against their strong setting-poles, firmly fixed against the shoulder. Thus, with their heads suspended nearly to the track on the running-board, they propelled their freighted bar e up the long and tedious route of the river. After a hard day's toil, at night they took their fillee," or ration of whisky, swallowed their homely supper of meat half burned and bread half baked, and retiring to sleep, they stretched themselves upon the deck, without covering, under the open canopy of heaven, or probably enveloped in a blanket, until the steersman's horn called them to their morning "fillee" and their toil.

Hard and fatiguing was the life of a boatman; yet it was rare that any of them ever changed his vocation. There was a charm in the excesses, in the frolics, and in the fightings which they anticipated at the end of the voyage, which cheered them on. Of weariness none would complain; but rising from his hard bed by the first dawn of day, and reanimated by his morning draught, he was prepared to hear and obey the wonted order, "Stand to your poles and set off!" The boatmen were masters of the winding-horn and the fiddle, and as the boat moved off from her moorings, some, to cheer their labors, or to "scare off the devil and secure good luck," would wind the animating blast of the horn, which, mingling with the sweet music of the fiddle, and reverberating along the sounding shores, greeted the solitary dwellers on the banks with news from New Orleans.

Their athletic labors gave strength incredible to their muscles, which they were vain to exhibit, and fist-fighting was their pastime. He who could boast that he had never been whipped was bound to fight whoever disputed his manhood. Keelboatmen and barge-men looked upon rafts-men and flat-boatmen as their natural enemies, and the meeting was the prelude to a "battle-royal." They were great sticklers for "fair play," and whoever was worsted in battle must abide the issue without assistance.

Their arrival in port was a general jubilee, where hundreds often met together for diversion and frolic. Their assemblages were often riotous and lawless to extremes, when the civil authorities were defied for days together. Had their numbers increased with the population of the West, they would have endangered the peace of the country; but the first steamboat that ascended the Ohio sounded their death-knell, and they have been buried in the tide, never more to rise.†

The progenitors of the western population were a race moulded in the strongest casts of nature; of athletic forms and massive stature, of powers of endurance and action, they were more than matches for the savages themselves, in their own pursuits of war or the chase. Yet were they happy and surrounded by the joys of homes and families, and their youths and maidens tripped the dance with moccasins and brogans with a zest and grace which would not have shamed our fashionable life.

Famous in the memory of the West are Daniel Boone, Simon Kenton, Robert Patterson, and George Rogers Clark. They belong * Monette's Val. Miss., Vol. II., p. 17. + Ibid., p. 19.

DANIEL BOONE, OF KENTUCKY.

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to the classic era of the country, and their exploits will yet find a Homer. Dr. Monette's sketches of these characters are to the life. We have only space for a few incidents in the career of one.

Daniel Boone was born a frontier's man, west of the mountains of Virginia and North Carolina, of excellent heart and head, and great bodily vigor. He first plunged into the wilderness of Kentucky in 1769, two hundred miles west of the Cumberland mountains. Here the beautiful plains of Kentucky were spread out to his view. The Indians surprised and took him prisoner, but with his companions he escaped. At another time he escaped alone. "Then followed the trying time of the wary hunter. Alone in the wilderness, without the means of procuring sustenance, or of defense against the beasts of prey, without weapons or hunting implements, he roamed sole white tenant of the dark and bloody ground,' compelled to starve, or to subsist upon roots, shrubs, and fruits. Thus did Daniel Boone spend the summer of 1770, until fortunately relieved by his brother's return in the autumn."

In 1779, he was a close prisoner among the Indians of Canada. He gained upon their confidence, and accommodated himself readily to their manners and course of life. They were off their guard. He escaped. Throughout all the Indian wars he was a warrior and a chief. On the return of peace his domain was stripped from him in the conflict of land titles. Boone, in disgust, departed the vicinities of civilization, and plunged still deeper into the wilderness. He crossed the Mississippi, and with his family fixed a home in Spanish Louisiana, on the banks of the Missouri. There death at last closed the scene, and his remains, long .after, were removed to the theatre of his early exploits by the people of Kentucky.

During the period of the Revolution, and afterwards, until 1795, the West was one continued theatre of ruthless and sanguinary warfare, in which all the charities and mercies of life were lost. The ruthless British foe, combined with the treacherous, unrelenting, unsparing savage, carried the shrieks of torture through the forests, applied the torch to the cabin and the village, and by its glare, and with the midnight yell, butchered the helpless inmates, young children, women and old age. Space will not allow us even to refer to these, or to the thrilling scenes, the unexampled adventures, to which they gave rise. Indeed, the whole history of the conquests of the white men over the western Indian, even through the wars of 1815, and of a later period, is a department of our history which loses nothing by the repetition, and which is related by Dr. Monette with a fulness to be found in no other work.

Ohio county was organized in 1776, and soon after the county of Kentucky. In 1779 the western emigrants suffered from a famine, of the most serious kind. Even after the price of corn had fallen to thirty dollars per bushel, continental currency, the tavern rates in Ohio county, we are told, were established by the County Court.