[Aud. 19, 190S, 
14^ FOREST AND STREAlVt. 
timber country throughout the Mississippi bottoms for 
good growths. He was a sarvmill man himself, up in 
Missouri, when the panic of '95' wiped out so many busi- 
ness men. 
“You people in the East didn’t know what it was to 
suffer,” McPike said. “I had a good big mill, and there 
were whole families dependent on it for livings. They 
liad to have money or starve to death. To shut down 
meant throwing them out doors. Lots of men did 
shut down and saved something. But I couldn’t do that 
— some of the men had been with me too long. So I 
run as long as I could, and wlien I went down, I went 
down hard. My friends told me I was a fool. But I 
don’t think so, even if I am only a hired man now.” 
MePike, like many another man I met, was emphatic in 
his dislike of the levee system. “Look at those fellows 
scraping off the mud down there! Why couldn’t they 
let the river fill up the bottoms, and fertilize the land — 
the land that is being all worn out now?” He thought 
that gates along the levee by means of which the flow 
over the land could be regulated, and the pressure on 
the levees eased off at intervals, might be a solution to 
the problem, “But you can't talk to people down this 
way,” it was said. “Tlie levee is years and years old. 
Before they leveed the west bank, it was right. It 
kept the water scattered in the Arkansas swamps. NoW 
she’s pent up in between, and when she goes through, 
something’s doing.” 
The levee, Roosevelt, and stories are unfailing sources 
of amusement for men with time to spare along the 
river. 
It was a great change from the cabin boat to the 
pilot house of the. steamer. The cabin-boater, when the 
river is in its banks, must look up to see far. The man 
in the pilot house looks -down on everything but the 
treetops, and sometimes 'he looks down on them. The 
cabin-boater is always on the verge of. trouble of some 
sort — he is low down in the scale of river humanity. 
One day, when I turned my glasses on a cluster of 
shanty boats tied in some willows, McPike remarked: 
“Do ye know ’em?” 
It happened that one of the boats was that of an 
unclean umbrella mender and tinware tinker I saw above 
Lake Providence, I said as much. There was a 
chuckle in the pilot house at the notion of any one ad- 
mitting being able to tell one cabin boat from another, 
“I met a cabin-boater once — happened to cross a 
ferry with him,” McPike remarked, “He was ^telling 
what a fine dinner he had eaten the day before, ‘Chick- 
ens,’ he said, ‘roast pig, a piece of beef, watermelon, 
sweet ’taters, vegetables’ — I don’t know what all that 
man hadn’t been eating. Said I to him, ‘Where’d you 
get all that? I bet some planter was set against you 
when he missed those chickens, and fixings,’ The 
cabin-boater yawed a bit, but he ’lowed I had him 
My own experience with the cabin-boater rather con- 
firmed the common notion of shanty boat people, Ihe 
fact of the matter is, the region between the Ipees— 
a strip a thousand miles long and miles wide is gov- 
erned by the river itself. Uncle Sam is relentless' with 
the men who sell liquor without a license, but for $25 
a man can go afloat on the river with bad whiskey and 
sell it in any quantity sixty feet from the bank, and the 
plantation owners have no recourse but to shoot the 
boat full of holes. At Lake Providence, and other river 
points, the ferry has a Government license. _ At Rose- 
dale, where the town is “dry,”, a whiskey boat is anchored 
the year around or was, when I was there. The magic 
license granted by Uncle Sam is responsible for fh^ 
worst of the cabin-boat people. It is far safer to do 
murder on the river than sell whiskey without a license. 
The steamers are under marine laws, and the passen- 
ger boats carry liquor by the jug full for shore patrons. 
The bar is shut up carefully at each landmg, but the 
moment the boat lands in many places, a thirsty horde 
rushes for the jugs and bears them away triumphantly, 
having handed the purser or bar tender the requisite 
money, , 
There is no regular police force over the river, save 
the lookout kept by the Government for unlicensed 
whiskey sellers. Killings, of which there are countless 
numbers, are often unavenged if done on a boat The 
only reason more thieves do not live on the river is 
the loneliness of the life. The telephone has helped 
the police of the river towns marvelously, however. 
The coming of a bad gang in a boat, or of stolen prop- 
erty can be made known far down the river. 
the smaller Government boats with a good crew and an 
efficient force of officers could wipe the river clean of 
the lurking bad men who now live -in shanty boats. Ihe 
boat would do a great amount of service in rounffing 
up the swindlers who beat the negroes out of their 
money by selling worthless medicines and other useless 
things. Such a boat should be empowered to drive the 
gasolene and other whiskey boats from the river._ A 
Government license that permits men to go within pistol 
shot of a plantation and sell bad liquor to the hired 
men, although contrary to the laws of the land, should 
be abolished. It should not be forgotten that when the 
whiskey boatman Hull fought the sheriff’s posse at 
Leota (Sterling), he was defending the rights given to 
him by the Government— namely, the rights to sell 
liquor to negroes in a county which the voters had 
tried to make “dry.” Hull doesn’t violate the law, it is 
said. He simply enforces his rights, granted by Uncle 
Sam and does it with Winchester and Marlin rifles, 
which he keeps here and there in his big gasolene. 
And if the river were cleared of its objectionable 
characters there would still be many excellent river 
people living in cabin boats along the stream. Fisher- 
men, recluses and characters a-plenty find the river a 
comfortable and pleasing land o Cariaan. With(^t D_r. 
White Mrs. Haney, Old Man Anderson, Charlie 
Brooks “Sunny South” Young, Uncle Cha lie Robert- 
son and countless others “tripping,” the Mississippi 
would lose half its interest. But most of the medicine 
men the gamblers, whiskey-boaters, and the crooked 
store-boaters could be spared, even though they do add 
to the interest of a river experience, not but what even 
the river bad men have their “good points, though 
usually the points are steel well worked down on whet- 
^^I^had heard of the fragrance of southern blooms, and 
of air so laden with the live perfume of trees in blos- 
som that it was suffocating. I' could now well be- 
lieve. these stories, for the delicious odor of forests in 
blossom floated over the river in fogs of incense. It 
is unfortunate that no poet has floated the river in a 
cabin boat. It takes a month to get used to the life, 
a month to learn its troubles so well that they are for- 
gotten, and then a month to become one with the sand 
bars, the caving banks and the wide waters. If, in the 
fourth month, the poet ran into a cloud of tree blos- 
som incense he would write five verses tO' the river and 
its_‘ flowers which tell of a fairy land, where the clouds 
rain perfume, where the main highway is undulating 
old gold, and where life is a sweet dream. 
■ As we floated down with the log raft, we met the 
main flight of migrant ducks. They swarmed up from 
the sand bars and from the river like so many giant 
bees. They seemed to be all within four days’ travel 
of one another. It gave me a view of migration which 
I had not seen before, and because the valley is so 
great a bird thoroughfare, I am surprised that bird 
students have not followed their favorite subjects down 
into swamp country where robins lose their dignity, and 
other birds begin their spring flirting. I was so fortu- 
nate one morning as to see several kingfishers gyrating 
over a little bayou in which the Medicine Man’s cabin 
boat was moored. One feature of their feats was an 
attempt to drop sideways through the. air, holding their 
wings outspread. To see birds which dive into the 
water bill first come down with the points of their wings 
first was sufficiently interesting, but the play of the 
soft, bright sunlight on their feathers was a spectacle 
to compare to clouds of invisible perfumes wafted 
across a torrent of river beauty. 
From Vicksburg to the mouth of Red River was a 
stretch of the Mississippi containing such places as 
Natchez, Ellis Cliffs, Fort Adams, Rowe’s Landing, 
Fort Hickey, Port Hudson, Lake Palmyra, soon to be- 
come the main stream again because of a cut-off a few 
weeks later, bayous and other things remarkable. It 
was like a pleasant dream of history, Fairyland and 
geography, and doubtless these places recall something 
of a nightmare 40-odd years ago. 
Just before noon on Saturday, March 26, the captain 
indicated a rip-rapped point of land a few miles down 
stream: 
"I hat’s Red River,” said he. “The water’s setting in 
there now.” 
I got my duffle ready, and shoved the blue skill off 
the logs into the water. Very quickly the raft dropped 
down till it was nearly opposite the river, and then I 
cast off and pulled for the river mouth up which the 
Mississippi was flowing rapidly. As I ran into the 
narrow opening, a storm broke loose, and rain poured 
down in white sheets. I found a new railroad bridge 
half a mile or more down stream and in a lean-to tool 
camp there I sheltered my duffle and myself till the 
storm passed by. It was only a rain squall, with lots 
of wind, from which I was sheltered by the trees on 
either side the strange stream, up which the water was 
flowing so rapidly that I went eight miles in an hour, 
and then I came to the head of Bayou Atchafalaya and 
saw why Red River is called red. 
The Mississippi was rising rapidly. It was 28 j 4 feet, 
which accounted for the contrary course of Red River. 
It did not seem as though that narrow stream, the 
color of dull red lead, could be the thousand-mile river 
from the Rockies. For a half minute I swung in the 
whirling eddy, and then the current swept me into 
’Chafalli, and then I was in the Louisiana swamps. On 
my left was a high bank of red alluvian, on my left 
a gentle slope, and on both sides were scattered moss- 
hung trees and levees. There were houseboats, land- 
ings with French names and one steamer, the Gem, 
passed up. It was a pretty little boat, and threw some 
waves that slapped the banks with a loud noise. 
As I had been told, the Bayou’s course was almost a 
straight chute. The bends were not the great Us or 
bottle necks of the Mississippi. The wind driving down 
from the northwest after a time tempted me to put my 
sail on the mast Dr. White made me, and for nearly an 
hour I drove down the rapid current at a fine rate of 
speed. But another squall was on the way, and in the 
first sprinkle of it I ran to a fish-dock, at a little cabin 
boat, Campbell’s. 
W. A. White’s Woodside plantation was at this place 
—1,300 acres of cotton — but F. L. Cashen has 3 miles 
front, and as deep on the bayou, so White wasn’t so 
much of an owner as some others. On asking how 
far I was from Red River, Campbell said 25 miles. I 
had come that distance in 3 hours and 45 minutes, 
which indicates how swift is the current. 
Mr. Campbell did not mind the pelting rain which 
sloshed down upon him and ran off the end of his red 
beard in a stream. His main anxiety for the moment 
was a sack of corn meal. It was his boast that he was 
about the only man in the country who could buy in 
any store thereabouts that he pleased, common men 
being obliged to make their purchases in the commis- 
sary of the plantation to which they were attached. Any 
hand in debt — and most of the hands are in debt — must 
get permission to move from the owner of the planta- 
tion on which he lives, and the owner of the plantation 
to which he moves assumes the debts. 
Campbell was happy in a contract by which he re- 
ceives $100 worth of masonry work to do each year. 
He pays $30 a year for rent on six acres of land, and 
raises many vegetables and some cotton. Eggs sell at 
the rate of four dozen for two bits — 6^ cents a dozen. 
But good chickens bring 40 cents each — the levee camps 
create a great demand for poultry. 
From this place it was 170 miles to Morgan City, my 
destination. The map showed a sufficiently complicated 
route to satisfy the ardent wish of any labyrinth seeker. 
Judging from the appearance of the map, the rivers, 
when they got too large, divided up and hunted other 
streams or lakes. 
“There’s worlds of land here waiting for settlement,” 
Campbell said, “jes’ worlds of hit.” He had found the 
place while wandering on the rivers of the Mississippi 
valley. With his wife- he had tripped the Missouri, 
Tennessee, Ohio and Mississippi. Now that he had 
some children, he had settled down to fishing, gardening 
and raising his babies. 
“I wouldn’t lift the cover of my fish box for less than 
two bits,” he said. 
I slept that night in the hay room of Campbell’s 
house. It was filled with corn fodder, and by the light 
of my lantern I arranged a bed with my canvas ham- 
mock and the bedding. My sleep was only broken by 
the rattling of rain upon the roof. Morning came as 
prettily as could be wished, and after a breakfast of 
fresh eggs and pone and biscuit and pork and fried 
fish. I pulled out into the river and started away into a 
region called “bad” by rivermen. 
“You see,” Charlie Brooks had said, “hit’s the jump- 
ing off place. When a man gits down in there, he’s 
safe — ain’t nobody gwin’ to pesteh him thataway. I been, 
down there myself — had a gasolene and the best time 
I eveh had in my life.” 
The wind shifted around after a time, so that I could, 
use the sail again. On the previous day the sail had. 
bellied so much that I didn’t get the full benefit of the- 
breeze. Now I rigged a little boom — a forked stick — and. 
in a few minutes I had my sail, nine feet high by six 
feet base, up into the breeze. The wind was strong: 
enough for me to sit on the starboard gunwale. For; 
rudder, I tied an oar to the hammock hook in the sterm 
by means of a bit of stout twine. Sometimes I ran intO' 
eddies of wind, the wind sweeping suddenly from the; 
port side of the boat, upon which I would do a quick: 
change of position. 
I reached Melville, where the railroad crosses the' 
bayou, and unshipped the mast to pass under. Whem 
I had passed this place, sudden qualms took possession: 
of my throat, and I swallowed violently. It was ai 
lonely wilderness. I saw a man sitting on horseback: 
in the woods on my right, partly hidden by the trees.. 
He reached into his hip pocket with his right handl 
and slowly brought something dark to a level with his; 
face. Remembering all the stories of ambush murders; 
I had heard, I thought this lone horseman might be; 
about to take a pot-shot at me. But he was only draw- 
ing a match box to light a cigarette. 
There were some short turns in the river, and where 
the current slid off the points, one saw how rapidly the 
water was flowing. The Atchafalaya is only about half 
as long as the Mississippi from Red River to the Passes, 
so the current is correspondingly swift. 
The banks grew lower as I advanced, and below Mel- 
ville the plantations rapidly faded from view behind a 
screen of forest, and the forest was dense, with the 
look of snakes in the underbrush and of a funeral cor- 
tege in the Spanish moss flying from the branches. 
They say in the swamps that Spanish moss protects the 
trees; but it seemed to me that the more moss there 
was on a tree, the less healthy the branches and bark 
seemed. Some trees appeared to be fairly sloughing 
away with rot that was wasting their living trunks. 
I passed a curious set of buildings on one side of the 
streams. They were whitewashed, and were markedly 
in contrast with the shady forest. I observed a man 
sitting some distance from one of the buildings with a 
shotgun across his knees. I guessed he was waiting 
for a shot at some ducks or other swamp game. Some 
distance further down stream I saw a similar aggrega- 
tion of buildings, and a couple of men with shotguns near 
the water. 
“Looks like they were waiting for a deer to pop in,” 
I thought to myself. They had the look of “rough 
men,” and I didn’t stop to make any inquiries concern- 
ing supposed infractions of the game law. 
I ate lunch as I sailed along, and noted with glee 
how rapidly the bank was passing behind me. Then 
suddenly I saw another aggregation of whitewashed 
buildings, with men sitting on chairs on a little levee 
built around them. The men had double-barreled shot- 
guns. Within the inclosure made by the three-foot high 
levee were many colored men, and the colored men had 
faded clothes of black and white on them. On lines, 
tossed by the wind, were similiar garments of black 
and white. The black and the white were in narrow 
stripes, and the stripes were horizontal to the ground 
on which the negroes were walking around. 
With a quick flip of the oar, and a sudden yank of 
the mast from its step, I ran my skiff in to the bank 
where stood a tall man with a double-barreled shotgun. 
I asked permission to land, and got it. I had found a 
Louisiana convict camp, almost of the kind one reads 
about. Raymond S. Spears. 
I. F. Wadsworth, of Zolfo, and W. R. Williams and 
S. E. Collins, of Crewsville, returned last week from a 
cow hunting trip to Parker Island. While in the woods 
they saw so many bear tracks and other signs which 
bruin had made that they could not resist the temptation 
to go hunting for more ferocious game than the gentle 
Florida cow. Accordingly, they devoted a couple of days 
to bear hunting with results that were enough to make 
President Roosevelt forever forsake the West as a bear 
hunting ground. Though Messrs. Wadsworth, Williams 
and Collins had no dogs with them and had to do their 
own hunting and trailing, they succeeded in two days’ 
hunting in bagging two bear and a panther, and would 
have gotten several more with most any kind of a dog. 
Few people know that for black bear there is no better 
hunting ground anywhere than in south Florida, and a 
day’s drive from Zolfo puts hunters where they can find 
enough sport to last a lifetime.— De Soto (Fla.) Adver- 
tiser. 
With the death of Sir Augustus Gregory, the last of 
thc: great Australian explorers has passed away. His 
demise recalls the most remarkable mystery in the annals 
o_f the commonwealth. Fifty-seven years have passed 
since an exploring expedition, commanded by a German 
scientist, Ludwig Leichardt, set out from Sydney to cross 
Australia from east to west. To this day nobody knows 
what happened to that exploring party. Not a scrap of 
paper, not a solitary relic of its fate, has ever been dis- 
covered. It must have been either overwhelmed in some 
natural convulsion, or absolutely annihilated by the 
blacks. Sir Augustus Gregory led two expeditions in 
search of it, one of them organized by the Royal Geo- 
graphical Society. — London Q*ronicle. 
On the links of the Merchantville (Pa.) Field Club a 
robin was flying across the green just as a player drove 
the ball from a tee. The bird was struck with full force 
and fell to the ground dead. 
