208 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
It Sept. 9, 1905. 
ties down to the work and gets , what’s coming to him. 
They’re niggers inside and out, and it’s got to be an 
awfully serious business that’ll keep a naturally cheerful 
higger down at the mouth more than a week or two. 
Malaria is what they suffer from most, and toothache 
‘Bridget’ was the camp dentist. He pulls teeth- .1 dont 
know how the fellows stand, it when he’s bearing down 
on them, but he gets the teM out.’’ - ■ 
It was a hot Bunday atternoon, but one'of the convicts 
took an ax and built a fire;m the middle of the yard. A 
dozen of the convicts crouched around it. ihe tire 
warmth and the sun heat' were different, and the chill 
patients enjoyed the fire. . . , • ..-u j ; 
At night the three night guards sit down m the dormi- 
tory and watch, They do not change off with the line 
ouards, but night after night sit there and wait for the 
coming of day. It would be easier for the man to break 
through the line guard than get out of the board shanty 
without calling down a charge of crippling small shot 
Of course the line guards would rush out fully armed at 
the first alarm. One man has a rifle ‘‘for long range 
work.” 
For amusement the white men have deer hunting, and 
they keep six or eight hounds with which the hooted 
quarry is hunted. The shotguns are good for rabbits 
and wild ducks and turkeys. But the whites find it no 
sinecure living way back there in the swamps guarding 
some of’ the hardiest and most desperate criminals m the 
“If one of them comes to you,, you’ve got to 
off If he don’t stop when you tell him to, -theh s only 
one thing to do, and that’s shoot— and be mighty quick 
about hit.” . , j 
The prisoners are brought in by steamei,_ and rarely 
a visitor comes to the place.. Just one thing in the camp 
suo-o-ested the outside world, and that was a small letter 
boriabeled “U. S. Mail.” This is the one thing the con- 
victs had to remind them of friends. Some of them wri e 
letters home, and more letters are sent away than are re- 
ceived by the convicts. 
A tinge of chill in the air and the slow fading of the 
sun, though it was still visible above the tree tops, re- 
minded me that I would better move on. As I went to 
the boat I observed that the water had only five inches 
to rise before it would be against the artificial levee 
around the camp. Nevertheless, the convicts would be 
kept there until the water was well up on the walls, itien 
they would have to wade to the levee work their buckle 
shoes sloshed full of water. Almost the_ first question 
asked me when I landed was put by a convict. He wanted 
to know if a “head-rise” was coming. , ■ , -r. 
d'he wind had gone down and I shoved into the switt 
current wondering what was before me for the night. 
Captain Barrow said the convict camp was the junapmg 
off place.” Beyond it were the swamps and the dense 
wilderness in which the river pirates of old had their 
dens, and in which the Acadians are found now in a state 
not greatly different from that in which they lived before 
the Revolution after the English found it necessary to 
transport them from Nova Scotia on account of their 
failure to appreciate the beneficence of England s rules. 
Between pirate descendams and Cajuns the outlook down 
Atchafalava was rather- promising as regards hurnamty 
and exceedingly so as regards unknown waters and wil- 
derness impassable to men afoot. ■ 
The current was a seven-mile one, and it soon swep. 
me beyond the jumping-off place, and at last I was really 
alone in a solitude about which one sometimes reads, but 
the fullness and beauty of which cannot be expressed m 
any common terms. , , t. 
When I started from Neiy.York I supposed that when 
I passed Cairo I would enter; into the land, of morass and 
impassable thickets under which the slime quaked and 
the cotton-mouth snake drew back its muddy length o 
strike. For 600 miles I had' come down the wide Mis- 
sissippi with an unobserved feeling of disappointment be- 
cause I hadn’t found the damp gloom- which my reading 
had led me to think was anywhere on the lower pussis- 
sippi It wms this feeling '6f disappointment which led 
me to go down the St. Francis, but this stream was so 
low that I had not seen the swamp feature of the bt. 
Francis bottoms at its best— or worst. Now, however, 
there was no mistaking the significance ^ of the things 
which I saw on both sides of 'me. This was swamp 
country. At intervals the water was running over the 
banks and pouring back under the trees with a loud noise. 
The land sloped back from the bank, down, instead of 
up and when I looked into the, .shades and saw m the 
shMows a few yards distant gathering pools of water, 
and realized that on either side of me for miles and miles 
wer« these depths of water and mud, I knew that the 
swamp lands of my imagination were there before me. i 
could see them with my own eyes. It was unnecessary 
for me to go knock the brush in order to scare the snakes 
out of their hiding places and assure myself that the 
snakes were there. I felt it in my bones. 
I passed Latannier City, an oil well, now disused and 
in the courts. It is said they drilled too deep and that 
the strata of oil was above the bottom of the hole. At 
any rate, the buildings were deserted,^ the boiler rusty, 
and the derrick beginning to darken with decay. At the 
head of Alabama Bayou was a fishermans camp— a split 
board house on stilts, with water beginning to cross the 
ground toward it in serpentine course and darts, the 
two men eyed me with undisguised suspicion and cring- 
ino- They told me of a cabin boat down stream three 
mdes. and at the cabin boat I found some river men who 
were' in a small new cabin boat. They were cordial, 
but the boat was too small for me to remain there over 
night. 
I passed houses on stilts, under which the water was 
gathered, and some of the buildings were deserted. At 
one place w'ere two houses built close to the ground. Here 
were several men who watched the water flowing across 
the ground on either side of the buildings with a melan- 
choly look that was pitiful. I swung the boat into an 
eddy. The water boiled in it, and the current roared 
on both sides the river, it was so swift. One of the group 
seized the bow chain and I went ashore, stepping a 
high place which was nearly two inches higher than the 
surface of the water. 
The men were Cajuns — Cajeans? — and spoke h-nglisn 
in dubious tones. Did I know how much more water 
was coming? I didn’t, and they lost interest in me. In 
French they asked me could I speak French? When I 
said I couldn’t they relapsed into silence. The land sloped 
so much toward the swamps at this place that the water 
ran rippling across the garden, the new growths of which 
were jerking in the current. The householder had tried 
to protect the garden by a tiny levee. He had shoveled 
up a ridge of earth ten inches high and five rods long 
between the river and the garden, and this had served its 
purpose for a time— -would have kept the flood back en- 
tirely had not it been a big one. The water, however, 
came around the ends of the levee and was coming in 
trom the swamps, and it appeared that Alabama Island 
". cuild soon be entirely submerged. The men went about 
their work of loading their household goods in pirogues, 
and I dropped down to the next house. This was a new 
one. the home of a newly married couple, French to the 
core. Their home had only one room, and, besides, the 
g-'ooni was fearful of the stranger. 
It would make little difference where I slept that night, 
for my boat was supplied with everything needful, but 
I did want to talk to some one in those depths. The real 
natives, the Cajuns, were suspicious of a stranger. But 1 
found an “Indiana Hoosier” at last, Bruce Lechner, ten 
miles below the convict camp. He was a tall, fifty-year-old 
man, who had lived in the swamps for more than twenty 
years. He had a fine, substantial house, with, a big fire- 
place, a herd of cattle in the swamps and horses and goats 
and chickens. The- year before thirty head of cattle he 
owned were drowned in the overflow. They were almost 
wild game, and it is -necessary to hunt them with rifles at 
times. He thouglit likely this overflow would drown some 
more for him. He showed little enthusiasm over the 
matter cane way^; or the other. It didn’t seem to- matter 
much — at least nothing, could be done to help. He wasn’t 
a farmer so -much as he avas a fisherman, anyhow. 
‘‘I was a Pennsylvania Dutchman, originally,” he said. 
He had a small' gray goatee, a lean brown face, and a 
lean look. Nevertheless, he was one of the rich men of 
the region. 
I swung my hammock in a little cabin twenty rods 
below Lechner’s house. This house, by the way, was not 
his real home, but just an overflow camp. His real house 
was one on stilts further up stream whicti I had noticed 
coming dowm, its yard full of water. 
“I’ve got another place cleared below here for a house,” 
he said. “I noticecl last spring that the land was high 
there — six inches higher than anywhere else around here.” 
When Lechner first came to the swamps he was a stave 
worker and earned $i a day. He had had experiences up 
and down the Mississippi bottoms. On one occasion he 
was with a gang of men getting out stave timber on 
Ouchita River. They were in a swamp four miles from 
high ground and were camped on the highest ground in 
the swamp. There was a rise in the river and before the 
men knew it, they were wading in water. They had just 
time to get into their flat boats when another wave came. 
Had their boats been carried away they would have had 
to take to trees and starved until the river went down. 
“While I was working for a dollar a day I laid out a 
trot line one night,” Lechner said. “I put the line out 
Sunday, and on Thursday I took the fish to the camp and 
sold some to the boss and sold the rest to a nearby town. 
I got $25 for that mess, and I wasn’t feeling like stave 
working, either. I went to fishing right then and I’ve 
been fishing ever since. I was the first man who came 
down Atchafalaya fishing — in those days you could catch 
more fish on ten hooks than you could on a thousand 
now.” 
The reason is not ascribed to overfishing, which is 
worth emphasizing. “Sharks and gars come up in here 
and kill them off,” Lechner said. 
The Atchafalaya is probably one of the most remark- 
able rivers in the territory of the United States. It is not 
much over a hundred feet wide in many places, but its 
depth is 200 feet in pools. Always there is twenty feet 
of water throughout its length, and large steamers have 
followed its course .without difficulty as to- draft, but at 
the bends they were in imminent danger of bumping into 
the banks. The fish migrate up it in schools — -carp and 
game fish. The gar, with a head like an alligator’s, and 
the shark, with- a scooping under jaw, follow them and 
sweep the waters of their prey. The fishermen find the 
gar .and shark most troublesome co-fishers. They are use- 
less water creatures to the swamp dwellers, though un- 
questionably their bodies would serve excellently for ferti- 
lizer. When a shark takes the hooked carp he rips up 
the trot line and yanks the cotton staging in two without 
much effort, tangling it up with the trot line and breaking 
the trot line itself if need be. Lechner says that the best 
trot line is wire clothesline, which does not corrode, or 
rot, as the common cotton trot cord does. Of baits, the 
little shad is best. 
Hoop nets are fished, and so are long set nets. When 
Ihe water is deep in the swamps — back in the woods — the 
fishermen go after fish with bush lines, run from tree to 
tree in the wilderness, following it with a pirogue, and 
getting lost sometimes. A submerged forest miles long 
and miles wide, with tangles of vines, trees so close to- 
gether that the narrow boats are sometimes too wide to 
go between them, and undergrowth absolutely impassable, 
is no place for a man with soft palms to lose himself. In- 
stead of watching the blow of the wind one must study 
the water currents, and hunt across them to Courtableau, 
Big Bayou Fordoche, Big Alabama or some other water- 
way leading a long ways around, but finally home again. 
Now and then one hears a Louisiana swamp man speak- 
ing of his homeland as “The American Venice.” That an 
Old World city with water streets loaned its name to a 
forested swamp is a note worth making. The people of 
these swamps live far apart. The “French settlement” 
on Little Alabama Island has four or five houses in it, 
scattered along a mile of stream. Throughout the whole 
region of the bayous the only roads and highways are 
streams of water. The occasional team of lean, insect- 
bled horses but emphasizes this fact. The horses haul 
wood to the houses, but are moved about on flatboats 
when they go anywhere. The men are strong armed 
from paddling, but they are not walkers, naturally. 
There is one negro who lives in the swamp depths will- 
ingly, He is a harmless old man. But others do_ not 
come. If one did “he wouldn’t last long.” That is to 
say, in these depths the negro is not wanted by many 
of the residents, and the colored man would be killed. 
I wouldn’t cafe to sleep on the ground anywhere in the 
ssm 
„ pg There are crawling things which 
squirm along ihe ground, and would likely find the 
warmth of a human body tempting and repay inhoSj^tal- 
ity by _Vicious bites. I swung my hammock in theijnsh ' 
house -clear of the ground a long ways, and slept ' 
m It, but wlicn I awakened in the night I shuddered ' at ’ 
the jOund of the river pouring past only six yards dis- ' 
tant, and probably eighty feet deep only ten yards beyond 
that. If was astonishing to me that the current didn’t 
wear the bank down, but apparently the bank was not ot 
a dissol'ving sort of earth. 
In the- morning I drank coffee with Mr. and Mrs. 
Lechner,' then watched him pull some hoop nets which 
contained , six fish, say 50 pounds. Looking at them he 
shook his head mournfully. “I used to make $10 before 
breakfast a few years ago,” he said. He looked at the 
water for a moment as he returned to the house. 
“The levees are to- blame,” he said. “They rush the 
water down here and pile it in on us like this— the floods 
pme higher here than ever before. For a while it’s go- 
ing to-be tough on us, but it’s filling in these swamp lands- 
so much that they^ll be near the highest water level before 
long— then you’ll see plantations down here as fine as any 
in the world. Cotton, sugar and fine houses will cover 
these lands. Forty years from now this’ll be cleared 
land.” 
Ihe Government has tried to open up the swamps.. 
Uncle Sam spent $25,000 on Courtableau Bayou clearing: 
out the' drift which was shunted into the bayous by the- 
Red River and Mississippi currents. The contractor 
drove flat dog spikes into the drift and tied the drift fo> 
trees alpng the. bank of the bayou by means of wire fopek.. 
It was in high water, and a fine clear way was made'.. ' 
When the water went down, however, the logs and .other 
drift rolled down the bank, the dogs pulled out, and the 
drift went free again. Had the drift been shunted into 
the woods, or even pushed against the lower side of the 
bayou it would have remained put, and the sixty- foot 
channel called for would have been preserved. No boat 
goes into Courtableau now^ 
Ihe fish boat from Mellville keeps Lechner in touchi 
with the ■world., He takes three papers a week, Pen-nsyL 
vania Grit, and the Semi-Weekly Times-Democrat of New 
Orleans. He- was more familiar with names great in 
American and European politics than I was, and he was- : 
refreshingly unbiased on many topics which half-informedi 
people decide and hold to regardless of the underlying, 
truths. Alone,_ cut off from the world’s enticing digres-- 
sions, he had time to think for himself, and think well. 
After breakfast of pork, eggs, flour biscuit and coffeei. ■ 
with condensed milk, we came down to the fish house. He 
.said that he had another house underway down the river,, 
and that I should notice it as I passed. 
“I don’t know how that place has been missed so long,”' 
he said. “Why last spring; it was four inches above the 
water,- and that was the highest water we’ve had in ten 
years. I built it six inches higher, and I’m going to live 
down there this spring when the water’s up. Men been.' 
going up and down this river for years, looking for high, 
ground, and they didn’t notice that.” 
I asked was there any danger to be anticipated dowm 
the river? 
“No, sir,” was the reply. “If you’re a man, you’ll be 
treated like a man, but if you ain’t, you’ll be treated like 
what you are.” 
This seems to be the length and breadth and thickness- 
of going among people said to be “dangerous.” A frank 
statement of fact, conforming with the previous experi- 
ence of the listener, will take one safely through any classt 
of people. A blue cotton shirt, and a. pair of corduroy 
trousers is as good an introduction on the Mississippi as- 
different raiment is in o-ther places. 
A minute after I hit the bank with my oar I was in the' 
solitude again. I saw a couple of eagles, a few circling buz- 
zards, a great ivory-billed woodpecker and heard the 
“white sucker, white sucker” of an oriole. The trees;’ 
were well, if not fully, leaved out. The leaves hung in 
clusters among which the Spanish moss squirmed when 
the wind reached down from the soft-lighted sky. The 
forest seemed smitten by an epidemic of disease. The;' 
clusters of leaves seemed mere patches compared to the 
size of the ashen trunks. Scars of sodden brown showed! 
where the branches had broken down, unable to sustain, 
their own '■weight. The wind rattled among the trees, 
with a wispy, _ salty noise while the water hissed along, 
the bank, tossing the overhanging branches and causing; 
great skeleton limbs twenty feet long to pound the water: 
and whip -the bmnehes round about — a dreaded sawyer, fife 
to cut myjlDoat in two should I get carried under or over 
one. At intervals along either bank were eddies, narrow,, 
boiling places - where the water writhed, and hummocked 
up, as though Jive things were in them — and in one, I am; 
not sure but what I did see a gar curve over, the sun.- 
light shining green on its back — and suggesting nothing; 
so much as one curve of a giant reptile. 
At intervals there were bends so sharp that the water 
piled up against the bank beyond. Here the waters were; 
fearful to look upon — not the boiling places, but the wide,. ’ 
saucer-shaped sucks toward the center of which things- 
began to lift their heads and long sticks stood on end and ' 
dived out of sight were the more horrible things. Pass- | 
ing down this stream was like a poet’s dream of the Styx< 
—at least like going to the funeral of a forest, with dead 
things as mourners, and the dying trees as spectators^. 
I was now within eighty miles of Morgan City, where II 
would take the best way home. I came to an odd group* 
held to the bank by a boy’s arms. It consisted of a gaso- 
iene boat, a small rowboat, and a pirogue. The gasolene 
was towing the rowboat, and in the pirogue was William 
Young, taking a large pink mattress to Butte la Rose, on 
Grand River, to exchange it for groceries. The mattress 
was filled with Spanish moss, and he would get $i for fill- 
ing it with the wiry stuff. Gathering black Spanish moss i 
is one of the swamp occupations. The moss is plucked, 
put in a barrel and then boiling wather poured over it to 
kill it. Then it is dried and packed into the bed mat- ' 
tresses and sent to market on fish steamers by the store- 
keeper. Young said he would show me the head of Little i 
Atchafalaya, when we got to Grand River, this little i 
stream being a part of my course to Grand Lake. We ' 
parted company with the gasolene, which was up bound, ; 
and floated down stream together, each curious to know I 
the other’s business, and each one in a fair way to being : 
satisfied. Raymond S. Spears, ' 
