May 20, ign.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
769 
is merely local conditions, soil, climate and the 
sort of life they have been leading for the last 
hundred and fifty years. 
Very little I presume can now be learned about 
the tribes or origin of the different importations 
of slaves. Some attempts have been made, and 
I have read the essays and articles, clever enough, 
hut their authors could obtain only very indefi¬ 
nite information. One of their ideas that has 
always interested me was that many of the 
slaves were tinged with Arab blood, and that 
the efficiency and intelligence of certain of our 
negroes could be accounted for in that way. The 
Arabs penetrated far into Africa. There are 
tribes there of mixed Arab and negro blood; 
the slave traders were often Arabs. For many 
years I have helped pay the wages in Virginia 
of a very competent negro whose face, every 
time I look at it, reminds me of Bedouins I have 
seen on camels along the edge of the desert in 
Egypt. 
Possibly the French manage the negro particu¬ 
larly well. They handled the Indians well in 
Canada. In Southwest Louisiana they ho'd the 
black man down with the same positiveness that 
binds him under the Anglo-Saxon of Alabama. 
V bile I was in Abbeville a white man without 
provocation assaulted a very respectable negro 
sitting in a chair and the negro got to his feet 
and knocked the white man down. The negro 
was arrested, and at least one white witness of 
the affair was ready to give evidence in his 
favor, but the negro w-as afraid to make a de¬ 
fense and allowed himself to be fined. The 
white witness who told me the story saw, I sup¬ 
pose, an inquiring look in my face. “I would 
not volunteer my evidence,” he said, “for I did 
not want the name of trying too hard to help 
a negro against a white man.” 
The French will, I think, be the last w r hite 
people from whom the rising flood of black 
population wall economically force the occupancy 
and cultivation of the land. I was struck with 
their fondness for farming; their contentment 
and attachment to it. Who would not be con¬ 
tent, some one may remark, with cultivating that 
rich land? But I think it is more than that. The 
life seems to suit them, especially their women. 
They are gayer, brighter, more appreciative of 
their situation than the Anglo-Saxon whose 
family is apt to break away at the first oppor¬ 
tunity and rush to town. Worse than that, the 
Anglo-Saxon family is often whining, discon¬ 
tented and miserable until the opportunity comes. 
It was really a great addition to the pleasures 
of sport to stop for a few moments at a farm 
house w'ith the stairs to the second story curi¬ 
ously built on the outside, and find the women 
lively, healthy, undyspeptic, speaking their beau¬ 
tiful old language with that courteous smile that 
belongs with it and has followed it to the delta 
of the Mississippi. 
Cannot those pinched, narrow' faces, that lack 
of interest in their surroundings of sunshine, 
woods and fields, the perpetual life indoors, the 
tastelessness, the drawling voice, be abolished 
from the rural descendants of the Anglo-Saxons 
in America, so that w'e sportsmen can be re¬ 
freshed with something more than a drink of 
water from the well? It ought to be very easy. 
It is largely a question, I think, of digestion and 
cooking, and getting rid of certain ideas about 
the advantage of ignorance, dirt and slovenli¬ 
ness which came in with the old tobacco-chewing 
Jacksonian democracy eighty or ninety years 
ago. The condition of those very depressed 
elements of die population in some of the older 
Souther n States, the so-called crackers and 
others, is not due to the climate, or the hook¬ 
worm, or the loca.ity, but to use one of their 
owm phrases, to certain' fool ideas that their 
ancestors got into their heads one hundred years 
ago; and, by the way, a young South Carolina 
physician has recently put forth some very en¬ 
lightening statements on this subject. 
It hardly proves the superiority of our Anglo- 
Saxon brain when we accept country life so dis¬ 
contentedly and turn it over at the first oppor¬ 
tunities to negroes and foreigners. There are 
of course regions where it is not so bad; it may 
be passing away, but there is a great world of 
it still left. 
I was struck with the neat, well fitting work¬ 
ing clothes of the men on the Louisiana farms, 
and often the pretty taste in colors. The whole 
thing in short was French. What a wonderful 
thing is race. How sure, at times, its trans¬ 
mission of qualities. Disraeli used to say it was 
the only true thing in history. “Blood will tell,” 
I was constantly saying to myself, and I had be¬ 
fore me the additional instance of the young 
pointer, Saxon, who, with the blood of the Rip- 
Raps and the Jingoes surging in his veins, was 
proving himself in the fie d as cool and steady 
as a deputy sheriff. 
Those level prairies with distant clumps of 
trees and buildings enhanced the French effect. 
They were very much like scenes in France, and 
with a little effort of your mind you could make 
them more so. If you closed your eyes a little 
so as not to see the cursed wire fences, you 
began to dream of things four thousand miles 
away and expect a bottie of vin ordinaire at 
those low buildings on the far horizon. When 
tile haze was on the prairies I have really seen 
a very close resemblance to the background of 
the Angelus. 
That dark lich soil, too, is like tertile France, 
but far richer than France ever dreamed of 
being. It is marvelous. A plantation can be 
turned from raising sugar cane to raising rice, 
and huge crops of both. Enormous crops of 
rice, sugar cane, corn, cotton and tobacco can, 
in some instances, and at certain times of year, 
be seen growing side by side. The descendants 
of Evangeline and her friends, I take it, have 
now no complaint to make against the British 
cruelty that brought them from Nova Scotia. 
I met workingmen who owned farms from 
which they received rent and worked at their 
trades, so to speak, at their leisure. One of 
them, a carpenter, very politely took me out to 
his fai m to shoot over it. There was a very 
pleasing obliteration of social lines, very little 
feeling about rich and poor, or yellow journal 
talk about mil’ionaires, because all belong to 
one class, the prosperous. They assume that a 
stranger is a man of property like themselves 
and looks at the world from their point of view. 
Tt was as fine an instance of successful American 
democracy as you ever find. The French cer¬ 
tainly handle the idea well. 
In this respect there was a resemblance to the 
West, to that very frank Western democracy, 
unconscious obliteration of social distinctions 
that I have found in the Dakotas, Nebraska and 
Western Minnesota; in fact, there is a strong 
tinge of Western influences in this part of Louis¬ 
iana. \ ou have crossed the Mississippi, and, 
just as in lexas, the West comes in with its 
hust.e, its broad-minded energy and its up-to- 
date farm machinery, which the French all have 
and seem to use with admirable skill. 
How did we Northerners acquire what we be¬ 
lieve to be a fact as much as we believe in the 
law of gravity, that the Southerners are lazy 
people and that white men cannot work in the 
South except in winter? It is the greatest non¬ 
sense in the world. I suppose we got it from 
reading about depressed localities in the older 
Southern States, the swamps of the Atlantic sea¬ 
board, the crackers and the clay eaters. The old 
rice swamps in Georgia were and are, I suppose 
it must be admitted, rather bad and malarious 
place's in summer time; but to apply this very 
limited information to the whole South, to the 
vast territories of Alabama, Mississippi, Louis¬ 
iana and Texas, or even to the Western Caro- 
linas and Georgia, is very stupid and altogether 
unworthy of our distinguished Northern enlight¬ 
enment. 
I was brought up as a boy on abolition civil 
war literature and I have no protest to make 
against the work we did in those days, but there 
were troops in the Southern armies called the 
Louisiana Tigers; our Northern artists drew pic¬ 
tures of them based on the crackers and clav 
eaters. I can remember them we 1, wild looking 
half-starved devils, shiftless, lazy, hard drinking, 
good-for-nothing, we were told; but they would 
fight like fiends. During my two weeks last 
winter in what our good books have called “the 
malarious and enervating influences of the States 
bordering on the Gulf of Mexico,” as I watched 
the energy and the vigorous well nourished 
bodies of the handsome people, I often thought 
of the o’d Louisiana Tigers and wondered 
where I could find some of them, or some of 
the other lazy, enervated, fighting devils we read 
about. 
The Abbeville region, where I was, is not, I 
presume, strictly within the delta of the Mis¬ 
sissippi, which is a term confined more properly 
to the water passages by which the great river 
now enters the Gulf; but geologically it seemed 
to me that I was within the sweep of the ancient 
work of the river and saw the remains of its old 
methods of carrying off the stupendous water 
floods of the North. 1 he whole region at times 
of great rains becomes saturated like a sponge 
wdth water which great'y increases the fertility 
of the rich dark soil. As this water drains off, 
as of old, through thousands of pores into the 
Gulf, it forces back the salt water for miles. 
Then as a dry time succeeds, the strong brine of 
the Gulf returns and sometimes forces its way 
fifteen miles up the Vermillion River to Abbe¬ 
ville. 
I he Gulf of Mexico, I understand, once ex¬ 
tended far up the Mississippi Valley, as a sort 
of bay or estuary, covering with water and muddy 
shoals w'hat we now call Louisiana, and as vast 
floods for thousands or hundreds of thousands 
of years poured dowm wdiole principalities of 
mud and alluvial soil, Louisiana and its rich 
ievel prairies were gradually built up in the 
estuary which had long been at the mouth of 
the Father of the Waters. 
V hat a grand cruising and exploring ground 
that estuary must have been, with its swarming 
life of birds, monstrous reptiles and fish in the 
w'aters, and w'ondrous animals along the shoals 
