Chapter V: Part 5

Anthony could not believe her. She pointed in the direction of Fort Rosalie. Smoke, heavy and ominous, was rising above the trees. The stockade, the settlers' houses, were on fire! To be able to kindle the buildings the Indians must have destroyed first the defenders and then have dragged out the women and children.

With one blow they had killed or captured five hundred French and avenged themselves upon the white race.

The many battles of the Natchez war which followed ended, after several years, in the destruction of that tribe. But Anthony, almost the sole survivor of Fort Rosalie, felt that the French had lost, in breaking with the semi-barbarous and skilled Natchez, more than any ultimate victory could have given them.

The princess took the pipe from his nerveless fingers and played some wild pagan strain. All aglow with triumph, she put her hands beneath the hereditary fire on the altar, gathered it up as though it had been a flower, drove her vestals before her, and went down a forest path out of sight forever, clasping to her breast the undying flame.

XI

STAGS OF TWELVE

One Victory for Chartres in the Financial Struggles of Pierre Duque de
Boisbriant--When Bubbles Burst

WHO planned the first Wild West show? Could it have been an American cowboy? No. It was a Frenchman. His name was Pierre Duque; his title, the Sieur de Boisbriant, Knight of the Military Order of St. Louis.

As king's lieutenant he was trying to regulate the tangled affairs of the Illinois region during an official visit to Fort Chartres on the Great River.

Louisiana to its remotest borders had gone to speculating on a form of paper credit which John Law, the financial dictator of France, had started in the promise of making himself and everybody else immensely rich without having to give value received at any place. His scheme was a bright Mississippi bubble. It burst at the prick of the collectors who demanded real money. All the towns were left in debt.

When he first thought of giving the show to pay the Illinois colony's bills, the Sieur de Boisbriant's whole face lighted up with fun. As he caught Anthony Auguelle's glance upon him he tried to look grave. He felt like a small boy in mischief and grew rather sheepish.

Anthony's dancing eyes arched their brows quizzically and he clucked a reproving sound between his teeth. "What do you mean, dear Sieur," he demanded, with an appearance of severity, "by enjoying yourself at a crisis so serious that I have come all the way from New Orleans to help you?"

"I have thought of a way out of our troubles that is gay enough to suit even you." And the lieutenant gave up to laughter as though he were more than pleased with himself. "Since the settlements at Kaskaskia and on the American Bottom are growing and a little post starting among the Missouri across the Mississippi, we are strongly established here at the mouth of the Illinois. Our Indians receive such good care that they are like spoiled children arrogantly demanding their own way in everything. If we try to make them work to help pay the debts of the fort they refuse our demands. They even threaten to join the Chickasaws against us."

Anthony frowned. "We never have enough men at any fort to defend it properly. We can't keep our own self-respect when we make such a poor showing before our dependents. How are we to raise crops for export when we haven't soldiers to enforce the orders of the overseers who command the Indians to plant our commons?"

"If the Indians could be made to understand how powerful France is; if France could see how remarkable the Indians can be; if both could be impressed with the importance of the explorers who go between them--then might we all assist one another to better purpose," began the Sieur de Boisbriant.

Anthony interrupted: "France herself is like one who has lost all in a lottery. The bubble has left her on the verge of bankruptcy. If we ask for more men or more money she lays aside our petitions and forgets them."

"Some special messenger of interesting personality might receive immediate attention even in the dilatory court," smiled the lieutenant. "I am thinking of sending a dancing-bear--"

"What!"

"And a panther cub in leash--"

"What!"

"And a stag of twelve--"

"What!"

"And a dozen of our handsomest young braves in war-paint and bonnets; the oldest and wrinkledest and wickedest medicine-man we can find with full regalia; the littlest, reddest, fattest papooses; squaws decked in bead-embroidered, fringed doeskin; and particularly one or two of those beautiful shell-bejeweled young girls, the maidens of the Illinois."

Anthony was speechless.

The Sieur de Boisbriant began again: "We must give up our dreams of such gold as the Spaniards found. Our wealth is in agriculture. It takes a longer time to develop fields than it does to pick up gold, but the riches are quite as sure. That nation is stable whose people live on the soil."

Anthony had no farming blood in him. He could not give up all dreams of a French Eldorado. "We found some lead in the Missouri country--"

"Also delicious wild apples of quite as much value as the lead," interrupted the lieutenant, in his turn bent on proving his point.

How little either one of them guessed that Missouri was finally to produce as its best known asset a crop of fun, through its humorist Mark Twain, which would supply not only the Mississippi country, but the whole laughter-hungry world.

Anthony rubbed his chin and thought about it. "It is true that our settlers in their log houses so neatly whitewashed and thatched, so pretty with the roses and grape-vines on the galleries and the violets growing side by side with beans in the garden, are more contented and industrious tilling the outlying fields of the commandant's common than are the gold-hunters who never get anything but yellow fever as they go prospecting. To enable this state of affairs to continue I must now catch a bear to hold a beggar's cup under the king's nose and collect a bit of needed money--is that your request?"

"It is."

It seems incredible, but they did it. Braves were selected for their prowess, squaws for their accomplishments, and maids for their beauty. Sergeant Du Bois of the fort was their chief assistant. He admired the lithe slenderness, the rich, heavy hair, and the delicate features of the Indian girls. He suggested:

"My lord lieutenant, let the chieftain's daughter, who is called a princess, be invited to head the embassy and give social tone to the expedition."

Oh, diplomatic young man! Oh, ardent lover! For this strange affair with the princess his name is written in history. His heroic deeds as a soldier have faded beside its romance.

Rude bears, reversing the plan of things, several times captured Anthony before he found the teachable cub he wanted. A mother panther tore off his clothes and some of his curls as he secured her too-playful kitten. The stag, a noble specimen, wild and full of fear, gave him more trouble than all the others, hobbled, muzzled, and harnessed though he was.

Down the river went the whole concourse to New Orleans. That hilarious town greeted their theatrical appearance with continuous applause.

To the travelers it was a holiday; to the manager of the menagerie a time of anxiety. Anthony's worst fears about the animals were realized. In crossing to the sailing-vessel the deer, released from the prison of a shed in the town, saw again the sunlight and smelled the flowing water. Voices from the forest called him. He burst the confining thongs, struck down his keepers. Plunging into the Great River, he swam to freedom.

The expedition was forced to sail without a buck.

A cat may look at a king. And so may a kitten--a panther's kitten. But not with half the astonishment which the king showed in looking at the kitten--such a curious kitten. His Majesty's eyes were round and full of delight as he gazed on the kitten's companions, that whole Wild West show of the Sieur de Boisbriant's devising.

"Our cousin of England has had a Pocahontas," quoth Louis XV; "for ourself, we prefer a variety in savages. It is our pleasure to receive the Illinois."

Right royally he provided for them, while they did their utmost to secure his favor. The braves, quite as much awed by the wonders of Paris as the Sieur de Boisbriant had expected they would be, danced their war-dances, sang their calumet songs, and presented him with a peace-pipe. They were given the stage in the Grand Opera. Squaws and braves in chorus made music of haunting, fantastic airs, accompanied by primitive instruments of a kind never before heard within those walls. The Indian flute of five exquisite notes imitating the songs of those native birds which the Louisiana ornithologist, Audubon, afterward loved so well, was the delight of the Parisian orchestra.

Ladies of the court were captivated with the barbaric handiwork of the squaws. Duchesses and maids of honor vied with one another in showing attention to the princess whom Du Bois was thoughtful enough to bring. These beauties of a new type were like live dolls to the French court. The latest Parisian creations in costumes were given them. Their hanging braids were elaborated to coiffures. High-heeled, narrow-toed satin slippers replaced their flat moccasins, and stiff bodices of the tightest girded their supple waists. If they were uncomfortable in these civilized costumes they did not say so, for they looked most charming.

Nobody liked the panther cub. Even the ladies would have preferred him in the shape of a muff. But the bear who danced to a gourd rattle and growled in Choctaw was the delight of all the children. It is painful to observe how short is the distance between ultra-refinement and savagery. Those French boys of noble birth forgot the obligations of their titles and acted exactly like a pack of young Indians.

They baited that bear!

And the bear broke his leash! The small dukes and marquises took to their heels. The bear took to his. He had twice as many legs as any one aristocrat and he made better time. He pounced upon a small chap. Howls as long as the list of his estates came from the child between hugs.

An Indian brave jumped to the rescue, snatched the victim, and ran for shelter across the park. The bear followed. A dozen Indians took up a pursuit of the bear. An excited court looked from the upper windows of the palace at Versailles to see an Indian with a child running toward them at a lively pace, while close behind him, taking the smooth lawns under the clipped trees as though they had been his own Missouri hillside, the bear also made good speed.

The king was highly diverted. The guards at the entrance gave way to the runner. They did not challenge the bear. He entered without a password. If the Indian had been accustomed to doors he might have shut one after him and put a barricade between himself and his pursuer. As it was, he went in at one side of the palace and came out at the other. All the court above-stairs, as in a gallery, leaned over the balustrades to watch the race and then ran helter-skelter to another side to be in at the finish. From every direction Indians were flying at the bear. The chase ended abruptly when they all piled upon him and the first Indian restored the boy to his mother.

"I would not have believed that a man could outrun a bear," was the king's comment. "He was going rather fast."

"An Indian on foot can follow a deer and bring it in as quarry at the end of the day." Anthony, occupying here, as elsewhere, the position of interpreter and entertainer, spoke with the freedom a chief jester might have used. "I would we might have brought with us a stag of the forest to show you, Sire, how these red men can endure."

The king turned upon him that look of genuine interest which all suppliants at the feet of capricious rulers strive so eagerly to rouse.

"It is not possible for a man to catch a deer!" exclaimed the king.

Anthony answered carefully, "A white man cannot, but these wild men are of different sinew and very quick in movement."

"In the forest near the Bois Bologne there is a deer-park. Call the gamekeeper! Let us see what we have," and his Majesty gave his whole attention to this alluring prospect of a new sport.

The Sieur de Boisbriant, thinking of his colony, had tried to tell of the oranges, lemons, figs, plums, melons, pecans, sugar-cane, rice, indigo, yams, and tobacco in the south; of the apples, berries, cherries, corn, wheat, and rye of the north. Du Bois had mentioned the water-power to grind all grains and saw the hard wood of the forests, of abundant fuel to work any metals they found. Both indicated that they needed a little more help until revenue began to come in from these sources. The royal ears were dull.

But they were sharp enough for any Mississippi product that could move as fast as a deer. "We must have a royal stag or two," was his animated decision as he consulted them in planning the races, which he insisted must begin forthwith.

How far are the prairies and forests of Illinois from the meadows and woods of the Bois Bologne? To Anthony they were just around the corner of any little grove. His heart was in the out-of-doors, never in the court of kings. He had been longing for the banks of his Great River with a consuming homesickness. As the race began all sadness vanished with one bound of his heart. A vista of this French park showed the king's deer in flight. He was a noble creature--a buck whose horns bore the rare number of twelve prongs--a stag royal.

On his trail came half the Indian hunters. The magnificent leaps of the deer were a thing to hold the watchers breathless. The lissome movements of the bronze hunters suggested the old red gods at play.

The chase was a contest of speed and endurance. Yet its grace and beauty were so marked, so new, so surprising and utterly absorbing, that all the spectators were silent and attentive.

Not to overtire the hunters or the buck, particularly not to surfeit the king, the time of the chase was limited and at the appointed hour the hunters were recalled. They had not been able to overtake the "game."

"We have another stag," the king said, with pride, on the second day. "Bring other runners. Who catches him may have him."

This was the beginning of those feats of daring which set Paris agog and gave the court the most absorbing entertainment of the century.

There came a day--a glorious day--when wind and sun and exhilarating air stirred the Indians like a Mississippi morning, when the buck went easily over brush-heaps with joyous leaps, when the hunters followed with winged heels. The quarry left them all behind. The red chieftain's pace never faltered. He began to gain. He went faster and faster. His speed was like the flight of birds.

Then came the moment which the king had thought impossible.

All eyes saw the Indian run beside the buck and lay a victor's hand upon a flank. Even a hunter mourns the death of a noble stag. The court had grown to love this woodland creature. As the Indian flourished his knife half the court screamed with disapproval. He turned its hilt. The deer ran on. The savage came back to lay the knife at the feet of the king. To spare the royal stag was an act of courtesy which delighted the French, for whose benefit Anthony had carefully planned the behavior of the red man.

Never again would that court forget the Mississippi colonies or idly wonder what sort of people Indians were.

In the cathedral of Notre Dame the king, amid great pomp and splendor, knighted the Sergeant Du Bois. He was given a title and the command of Fort Chartres.

A knight who is a commandant is a very eligible husband for any lady of quality. The Sieur Du Bois--"brave, bold, and loyal"--was given the hand of his princess in the presence of the court.

The great organ of the cathedral pealed, the censers swung, the choir boys chanted, and the priests married the beautiful girl of the Illinois to the titled young commandant.

The Sieur de Boisbriant, with papers of lengthened credit in his pocket, with a gift of more troops and munitions loading at Havre and promises of endless patronage from his sovereign, stood hand in hand with the happy Picard du Gay all through the gorgeous ceremony, their thoughts on the towns of their Great River and how they were to be lifted above debt and into prosperity as a result of the races with the stags of twelve.

XII

BRIDGES OF BOATS

A Legend of a Crossing by the Forerunner of the Engineer, James
Eads--From Cajeux to Caissons

ANTHONY stared at the needle of his compass. He reversed the box and looked again. "Of course the needle points to the pole; it can't do anything else." He turned his face to the north. "Now my right hand is toward the east bank of the river; my left hand is toward the west. I have been going up the river all day." He had been following the Mississippi and he wrinkled his nose in perplexity as he made the discovery. "The sun is setting on the east bank of this Great River!"

The more he thought about it, the more he was sure. "The channel wanders so crookedly over this flat plain that the stream, whose general direction is south, must be going straight north at this particular turn in its winding!" He had guessed the right answer to the Southern riddle, "Can you name a spot where the sun sets in the east?"

The dislocated sunset had a lowering aspect. Anthony scanned the clouds with the eye of a weather prophet. "It looks like more rain. A wet moon is overhanging these lands, already quite damp enough."

Two Indians, dripping from a recent shower, were sloshing along in the mud of the bank. They signaled him. He put ashore in the funny little coracle he was using. A coracle is a fishing-tub made of a wooden frame covered with skin. It is as safe as it is slow. The French prefer it to the canoe for angling.

"Medicine-men danced all night," began the Indians. "Our old Father of Waters, the Meact-Chassippi, is angry because the white man has tried to imprison him within his own banks. All land belongs to Meact-Chassippi. He wanders over it where he wills. Who defies him must perish. He is in a rage and has come to destroy our camp. The white men who oppose him must help us."

Anthony never treated any Indian messenger carelessly. Under every flowery speech and childish demand was some vital human need. These Chickasaws were leagued with the rival English. They were bringing their warlike camps nearer and nearer to the French settlements. All the doings of the colonists and every unfriendly act of nature they construed as a good reason for criticizing or attacking the posts.

"It is easy for me to stop the Great River's flow," replied Anthony, with fine sarcasm. "I will do it after your tribe has taken all your camps back into the hills of the Chickasaw country where the Meact-Chassippi can't get you. Tell your chiefs to move away to their own high ground. Then will the inundation cease."

"We cannot return with a message. As we came the lowlands flooded themselves behind us."

"By the magic of my coracle, one of you shall go back to your Chickasaw sorcerers. If the camps come toward the Great River it will drink them up. If they go back into the hills the waters will recede," was Anthony's ultimatum. The messenger inverted the coracle upon his head and waded away to launch it. The wily medicine-men who sent him out in rising water, with the surety that he could not swim back, would use his disappearance as a cause of war against the French. In the coracle he would reappear with the promise of falling waters and the positive command to retire if they wished to keep dry.

"That outwits our Chickasaw medicine-men for the present." He smiled at the other Chickasaw, who stood ankle-deep on what was supposed to be the shore. A wide river stretched before them. Behind them was the flooded plain. As far as they could see the ground was covered with rapidly deepening waves. Some place the bank had burst and Meact-Chassippi, old as it was, frolicked with abandon.

Once it had lived in a glacier and had come down over the plain, chiseling with knives of ice a gully through the limestone. Then in the middle of this immensely wide stone valley it had begun to make itself a soft bed of silt. From fertile hillsides and deep-loamed prairies its tributaries carried fine particles of earth in their water and dropped it as they went along the channel until there was a deposit of mud in the center of the valley much higher than the surrounding country. The old river has made itself a bed where it can overlook the valley. There it still turns and twists, with never-ending restlessness. All the banks of mud are soft. The swiftly flowing stream digs now here, now there, straightens one part of the channel, makes loops in another. It carries away whole acres from one place and, dropping them in another, changes the aspect of a neighborhood every season in the year.

As mud is piled upon the banks rank growth of grass, brush, and trees springs up to beautify and hold them. Thus they grow firmer year by year. In spring freshets, as the melting ice and heavy rains bring down high volumes of water, the southern channels are cut deeper and burrow under the banks, dig through them or rise up and tumble over them as over some big dam. Then it begins all over again to make a new bed for itself along the new channel thus formed. The old bed becomes a bayou. Nothing is certain about the Great River except the uncertainty of its next flood.

Anthony was quivering with laughter; it was so absurd to be paddling with unwebbed feet where only a duck belonged. The Indian showed no emotion of any kind. But when the jocose white man and the apathetic red one questioned what to do, both pairs of lips formed the one word, "_Cajeu_."

So they set to work splashing among the canes, breaking them off, laying them flat like a mat, and weaving them together with long leaves and grasses. One of these little rafts was set upon another, with the canes of the first running at right angles to canes of the other.

On this frail craft, half awash under their weight, they used their hands for oars and started for New Orleans. Their utter helplessness, like two insects on a floating leaf, did not in the least disturb them. They were doing in precarious simplicity what had often been done before. That they crossed safely was not a wonder. It was a custom. The first bridge over the Mississippi was that primitive boat, the _cajeu_.

In New Orleans the Chickasaw went to the authorities and told his mission. Anthony's report of a broken bank and the rising flood gave much concern. The whole town, in a drenching rain, examined the puny walls of earth wherewith they had tried, as the Chickasaw declared, "to imprison that mighty giant, Meact-Chassippi."

In selecting a site for the town it had been necessary to find some spot that would be easy to reach by the ships coming through the Delta and also through Lake Pontchartrain. The highest place was taken, but even that could not be very high in this low flood-plain.

When the energetic citizen Dubreuil took a shovel and threw up this levee, and then dug a ditch inside to carry away the drip, he did a sensible act. The water was standing two feet deep in the houses after every freshet. Yellow fever followed all inundations.

The colony's engineer, Sieur La Tour, had ordered each householder to put a palisade around his premises and to cut a ditch outside. The levee was made higher and stronger. The assistant engineer, young Pauger, was proud of the system of defense.

"Why so serious a face, my Tony?" he asked. "Are we not protected to please you?"

Anthony could not laugh. "This will be a very wet season."

"How do you know?"

"By the way the sky lowers, the manner in which the beasts take to the uplands, by the odors in the air, and"--here he wagged his head sagely like an oldest inhabitant--"and a feeling in my bones!"

Although Pauger was a hard-headed mathematician, he had faith in such uncanny "signs" as Anthony picked up from the Indians who lived in the open. He always acted upon them seriously. "We must get permission to go up the river and show the smaller outposts our manner of making a dike," he said. "Then will they be secure against the coming freshet."

As the pirogue, which was a tree-trunk hollowed out in boat shape, was being paddled to the north, Pauger inquired: "Why do you look behind us so often, Tony? Do you see any one?"

Anthony shook his head.

"Do you hear something?"

Another negative.

"Do you _almost_ know that we are being followed?"

Anthony nodded. Pauger believed a pursuer was on their trail as fully as he did that a flood was coming.

Like little fishes, they kept near shore out of the strong current. Their food and their fire-pot were in the pirogue, and they slept at night curled up in bow or stern while the boat was hidden among fallen trunks which looked exactly like itself.

They could not discover the thing which stalked them--did not know whether it was man or beast, by land or water.

Still it came on, and they hid from it and fled before it as any other explorer would have done.

The few posts on the river welcomed them, listened to Pauger with respect. They agreed to begin at once, for their own sakes, to set up stockades at the points of most exposure, to heap them with dirt, to dig a moat, and to prepare for a heavy freshet.

Several times the pirogue crossed the river, which was not yet too dangerous. The French called any boat, big or little, a "water-carriage." If a hydroplane had dropped down beside these two old-time rowers they would have had no other name for even so startling a vision.

The "water-carriages" of the Mississippi have been of changing styles. The resources of the country determined their shape and power. American pioneers who followed the French took lumber from their forest, sawed it into planks by their water-driven mills, spiked and doweled it together, and built big flatboats, guided by poles, on which they loaded the products of their farms and floated down to New Orleans to sell the goods, boat and all. Thousands of flatboats at a time lined the wharves of the post. At the beginning of the nineteenth century steamboats, at first small and clumsy, afterward large and graceful, were going up and down the Great River, carrying undreamed-of tonnage and housing passengers in luxury as soft as the palaces of France.

Anthony and Pauger would not have believed a word of any story which foretold a steamboat or a hydroplane, yet they had absolute faith in the enemy prowling unseen.

At Fort Chartres they found the garrison already alarmed. An eddy of the rising water was beginning to eat away the peninsula which stood between the fort and the Mississippi. No engineer with definite plans for spiles, stone barriers, and dikes ever found more energetic helpers than Pauger in the folks on the Illinois.

Each day they labored on the levee. Every night some untoward accident happened to delay it. Tools were lost. Openings grew larger. The best logs rolled to the brink and floated away.

Said an Illinois chief in secret to Anthony: "The manitou of the waters is against us. He does not like to be turned from the path of his desire."

Like a flash Anthony saw the cause of their troubles. It was the Chickasaw! He had followed them from New Orleans. He was doing the damage; he was spreading dissension. That his meddling might drown the whole Illinois nation did not deter him if he could thereby destroy the fort and its white men to propitiate his manitou.

"We must set double guards to-night. We will both watch," Anthony said to Pauger as he told his news. "The cut by the eddy is forty feet deep. If it begins to undermine the mainland the fort itself will topple in."

In the early hours, while the sentinels snored carelessly, as they had probably done every night, a dim form--silent, slow as a wraith of smoke, drifted along the center of the stockade and pried and pulled and sawed away at the last spile set like a keystone to the arch of the barricade. The engineer, with dreadful visions of his whole levee going down, ran toward the figure, firing his pistol. Anthony called, rousing the garrison to stop the fatal leak which must follow such a break.

The bullet missed the Indian. It so startled him that he lost his balance. He fell straight into the gap his own fanatic hands had made. With his body head downward in the mud he stopped the gap. Earth closed round him, the spiles settled, his bones formed the cap of the arch--the levee held.

Poor Chickasaw! Only one of many victims to the tyranny of the Great River, so bountiful, so mysterious, and so awe-inspiring!

When Anthony and the engineer had made sure that the level was not injured they did a foolish thing. Going 'way down to the Mississippi bank, they climbed a giant gnarled oak to view the flood now sweeping on in fearsome grandeur.

The tree, long undermined, chose this hour to fall. The oak--roots, earth, trunk, branches, all--dropped into the stream and whirled away. The two men clung desperately to the branches they happened to be on and went down-stream with it.

The heavy roots, like the stone tip of an arrow, went first. The boughs floated with their lightest side up. In them rode the two explorers with the speed of an express train.

They crept together as full of terror as two children might have been. They wedged themselves in secure nests among the stout old limbs. Exhausted, one watched while the other slept. Hungry, they chewed the leaf-buds. In the most dangerous of all water-carriages they bridged the stream from side to side, yet dared not try to get ashore.

From a crumbling hill a panther leaped upon their wildly hurrying craft and crouched against the trunk, mewing piteously. Afraid of the men, of the flood, and of the rocking tree, it dared not move to attack or defense.

The merciless waves at last threw them into a bayou against a turn of a bank where other debris was plastered, spread out like fans against the bluff.

* * * * *

Why is one man superior to his fellows? Why should Pauger, marooned in a brush-heap on a flooded river, tired and wet and hungry as he was, notice that the running water was dammed by the closely interlaced branches of fallen trees on either side of its channel?

They prevented its spread; so it began to dig for itself a deeper and deeper channel in the less resisting mud of the bottom. "If we were to plait branches with small limbs and strengthen such mats with heavy posts against the shores of the Delta to keep the river from spreading, then by its own force would it dig a deeper channel for itself as it goes to the sea just as this stream is doing. Such a device of branches would keep open the ship canal to the Gulf." This observation of the engineer Pauger was the beginning of the idea of those jetties which now clear the water path to the sea.

There was a boy of French extraction with the mind and spirit of the early explorers who chanced to be born in our own times. His name was James Buchanan Eads. He had the title of captain. Pauger's first hazy inspiration of the jetties Eads perfected and put into practical working use at the mouth of the Great River. He improved all the old systems of levees.

During the Civil War, the President of the United States appealed to Eads to aid the navy. In response to the country's need he invented the gunboat, forerunner of armed cruisers; built several in an incredibly short time, and sent them to thunder at the forts of Vicksburg and turn the tide of battle in favor of the Union.

He was a builder. Caissons, those large water-tight boxes within which work is done under water, were his invention. They made possible the construction of that long bridge, a triumph of engineering skill, which crosses the Mississippi at St. Louis and spans the years from our day to that hour of the flood when Anthony went from east to west on a floating tree.

Pauger was fainting under the strain of their exposed position. To encourage him Anthony said, "The post of Point Arkansas is just below here." Filling his cupped hands with water, he sent up shower after shower of mimic rain between them and the miserable, cowering beast. "Pretty pussy! Pretty pussy! Now--_scat!_" She backed away from the spattering water which all cats hate. As she crawled up the tangled roots she spied some patches of dry ground. In a tawny streak she leaped the chasm from the dripping tree to the knobs ahead, and disappeared.

Then Anthony, quite as a part of his day's work, stretched his half-unconscious companion on a spreading limb, detached it, and, abandoning the tree, swam down the bayou, pulling the precious load after him until he found a landing-place.

He was weak. The heavy water nearly overcame him. The landing was difficult, his companion was a dead weight. Several times on the point of sinking, he did not give up, but made the shore by supreme efforts. Taking Pauger on his back, he started for the post. The garrison saw him and came running out with welcoming shouts.

The sun was bright, the air clear, the whole happy world looked good to Anthony. He had taken part in great events and had seen many noble men whom two nations remember with gratitude. He little dreamed that in all the history of the Great River there were few explorers more heroic than he had been that day.

AFTERWORD

AS the boys of bygone days grew to be men they handed down to other lads in the stories of their adventures the history of the events which had happened to them and the things they had learned from experience.

If it were not for the knowledge thus accumulated and given to us by many past generations the young Americans of these times would still be running about naked, fighting with sharp stones, and eating one another with the appetite and manners of the first savages.

When the United States bought the country called Louisiana she acquired much more than the land; she received also the recorded experiments and the results of the hard work of the French for more than a hundred years.

Their successes and their failures, their romantic struggles, their dauntless spirit, their ideals of fair play, were all a part of the same inheritance.

Wherever a French explorer set his wandering feet there has since followed an American business man to develop the fabulous wealth of those first discoveries.

The iron deposits, north of the sources of the Great River, where the fur traders wandered, when smelted by the coal further south, have yielded the richest ores of the world. Lead- and zinc- and copper-mines have done the same.

Wheat-fields in the Red River region have sent their farmers to mill at St. Anthony's Falls with the heaviest grist ever known.

Water-power has sawed the lumber of countless forests. Prairies have pastured as many domestic cattle as ever were fed in the time of migrating buffalo herds.

Corn- or cane- or cotton-fields border the river everywhere. Orchards flourish in many states.

Each region has its own city which it supplies with products for export and which in turn manufactures vast quantities of necessary and luxurious articles. These cities from source to mouth are strung like precious pearls of wampum on the glistening thong of the Great River's length.

Through the jetties and out across Lake Pontchartrain now go the loaded ships taking supplies to the nation who first planted these shores with food crops.

The semi-barbarous red tribes which once roamed the whole valley, quarreling so among themselves that they were few in number and often starving and ill housed, now live on smaller areas, cultivating prosperous farms. They are probably more numerous than they were when the continent was discovered. In civilization they grow apace, as the early fathers dreamed they might.

The black races, brought by force to the Mississippi Basin, have marched from savagery to civilization in two centuries. They have added to history the name of one genius world famous.

In an Atlantic harbor of the United States stands the Statue of Liberty, given by France to her sister Republic. The flame of her torch glowing like the spirit of the first explorers is kept forever burning to guide humanity to Freedom!

THE END

Transcriber's Notes

Page 49, hugh changed to huge (were not as huge as the immense)
Standardized the spelling of Ship's Island
Silently corrected punctuation