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With the Louisiana French 
Impressions of a Northern Sportsman After a 
Two Weeks’ Sojourn on the Prairies 
By SYDNEY 
neither the chemistry of fire and food, nor the 
W ISHING to enlarge the experience of a 
young pointer dog as well as my own, 
1 took a trip last winter in Southwest¬ 
ern Louisiana, where the vast marshes and the 
rice and sugar plantations lie; where Evangeline 
and her friends settled when they were driven 
out of Nova Scotia by the British Government 
nearly 200 years ago; where Joe Jefferson, the 
actor, had a delightful winter home in the midst 
of a vast acreage of fertility; and where, among 
other curious things, is the one spot where the 
plant that produces tobasco sauce is raised on a 
smalt island. 
Distances illimitable, endless vastness of mars.i, 
level prairies and the shoal waters of the Gulf 
shifted in and out by the winds, somewhat op¬ 
press and weary the eye of the Northerner ac¬ 
customed to more varied scenes; but when we 
leave the nerve-racking railroads and begin to 
conquer the vastness with our own or horses’ 
feet, the weariness changes to inspiration. The 
bland climate is invigorating, and to rest be¬ 
neath the liveoaks after severe exercise and 
watch the intense semi-tropical sumight and ex¬ 
perience the profound stillness was the most de¬ 
licious of pleasures. It is a land for out-of-doors 
life, and if 1 could have kept away entirely from 
vihages and towns, my happiness would have 
been complete. 
The Louisiana horse—the native one, of course 
—is a study, and 1 parted with him with regret. 
Small, a lied to the bronco and the cayuse that 
we know in the West, he is more compact, 
lighter, prettier, I think, and without the cayuse 
Roman nose. I saw only one or two instances 
of the cayuse head and face. The Louisiana 
horse seemed to me like what I have always 
pictured the original mustang to have been that 
we read about in those books that delighted our 
youth forty or fifty years ago. His gaits are ex¬ 
cellent. and the distance killing singlefoot, jog¬ 
trot—dance really—and the easy lope, can be 
sustained in a way that is rather unusual, I think, 
in other places. In this respect he is much the 
superior of the native horse of the Kissimee 
cattle prairies of Florida, with which I have be¬ 
come familiar in recent years. 
The Louisiana native specimen can live and 
work on grass, and many of them do not know 
how to eat corn or oats. Four or five years 
ago they could be bought, I was told, for $10 
G. FISHER 
apiece, and now the price is $30; so surely does 
the automobile and the trolley car raise the 
price of horses. There is an attitude and swing 
in the way they start on the.r gaits that seem 
to imply end ess generations of distance killers; 
a sort of pathetic acceptance of the fact of those 
vast spaces to be overcome and a grim determi¬ 
nation to face them to the death. 
1 have seldom been in a place where sadd.e 
horses were so numerous and used by young and 
old at all hours of the day and night. "Lend me 
your horse a minute,” ("Pretez moi votre cheval 
un moment”) a man will say to another in the 
streets of Abbeville. The rider will swing out 
of the saddle and his friend will mount and the 
shoeless hoofs will patter away over the soft 
street on some errand at the other end of town. 
In the balmy evenings groups of three or four 
people would often ride their horses, slowly 
single-footing, up and down the main street, 
gesticulating and talking, usually in French, for 
that is the language of the country. "All old 
Louisiana people,” I was often proudly informed, 
"speak French.” 
There was a touch of foreignness in it; a 
reminiscence, too, of Asia, for the nimbleness 
and lightness of the horses and the easy seats 
of the riders were not exactly European. It was 
very strange and pleasing, this old world touch 
on the edge of the advancing rush of American 
civilization. It was faint; you just caught it; 
and it is destined, I suppose, to be overwhelmed. 
Those who wou.d see any of the old ways of 
Abbeville must visit it soon. 
In my shooting excursions among the farms 
and plantations most of the people spoke French 
alone. A negro laborer was more apt to answer 
you in English. Taking the population alto¬ 
gether, both rural and urban, the majority in this 
particular region seem to speak both French and 
English. One of my acquaintances, a descendant 
of one of the Germans who were among the 
settlers of Louisiana, spoke only English, and he 
told me that neither his father nor his grand¬ 
father had spoken French. 
The first fact that impressed me was the cook¬ 
ing. It was French and excel'ent, and even in 
that rural community your digestion was safe. 
Indeed, it was improved, and I recommend the 
region to our long suffering millions who, in 
spite of their high intelligence, comprehend 
chemistry of their own stomachs. 1 consulted 
the commercial travelers—there are few better 
judges of gastronomies—and they told me that 
their experience invariably was, exce.lent cook- 
ing, neat service and cleanliness in the French 
villages, and in the English—well, let us not 
print it. 1 had one or two experiences of the 
contrast. 
In the old French inn at Abbeville, surrounded 
on both stories with deep verandas, the landlord 
himself banged at your door at seven in the 
morning and asked if you would have coffee, and 
if you said yes, it was handed in at once—power¬ 
ful stuff, black as your hat, for these French 
have strong nerves. By the way, that man was 
about the only landlord I have ever seen in 
America. Of course, I have seen hundreds of 
hotel proprietors and hotel clerks, but he was 
a landlord. He attended to everything; the inn 
was individualized; it was his inn of which you 
were the guest. 
The building was rather old and shabby, but 
after a very short experience of the methods I 
found myself lying down and rising with an 
absolute confidence in the cleanliness, and a very 
delightful gratification of my taste for certain 
old-fashioned “unprogressive” decencies and 
amenities. The dining room was really charm¬ 
ing and not a place from which you fled. I 
have had many a horrible experience of diet 
and beds in my rural wanderings and sporting 
trips of the last twenty years, so that this Louis¬ 
iana instance amazed me with delight. 
The farming land I found owned, occupied 
and tilled by white people. It was not the fre¬ 
quent Southern case, growing, I fear, more and 
more common of negroes occupying and work¬ 
ing the land, and the whites all huddled in the 
towns and villages whence they rule the negro 
tenants econonncally and politically. It is a pro¬ 
cess which, if logically continued for many gen¬ 
erations, will presumably increase the blacks and 
diminish the whites unti’ there is a vast dark- 
skinned population occupying the land, ruled by 
the military force and intellect of a very small 
white minority, as in the British West Indies 
and in India; indeed, this condition has already 
been largely reached in the black belt of Alabama 
and Mississippi. How far it will spread is one 
of our problems. 
It will be many a long day before it reaches 
Southwest Louisiana. The negroes there are not 
very numerous, and a most respectable looking 
competent set—a strong contrast to the very 
African looking hordes of half savages I saw 
in the black belt a year ago. One cannot help 
wondering, when he sees these striking differ¬ 
ences among the negroes in different parts of 
the South, whether it is caused in any way by 
the parts of Africa or tribes from which the 
negroes were originally brought, or whether it 
