Philip Nolan's friends

Front matter

A STORY

OF THE CHANGE OF

WESTERN EMPIRE.

Preface

The silence of our historians on the subject of the annexation . of Louisiana to the United States, or their indifference, is very curious. It is perhaps even necessary to explain to the general reader of to-day, that the “annexation of Louisiana” was the annexation of all that the United States holds west of the Missis¬ sippi, excepting the province of Alaska, and the regions secured by the Mexican war and consequent negotiation with Mexico. The standard histories, when they speak of the annexation, allude to the final debates in Congress ; and the history of the negotiation, as given by Marbois, the French negotiator, is sometimes con¬ densed. But little more is said. Yet it is the annexation of Lou¬ isiana which makes the United States of to-day to be one of the great powers. Without the immense region then known as Louisi¬ ana, no Pacific coast, no California, — no “ empire from ocean to ocean.”

I suppose it is safe to say that the Federalists had attacked the purchase so eagerly, that they were afraid their attack would be remembered. Of the distinguished Western men, the separate plans had been so diverse, sometimes so treasonable, that their representatives have not dwelt much on the story. On Mr. Jeffer¬ son’s part, I think there was an uneasy feeling that the credit was none of his. The truth is, that the credit — so far as there is any to be given to one man —of this great transaction, which makes the United States what it is, is to be given to Napoleon Bonaparte. I mean that he originated the plan which was carried out, which no one else had proposed; and he is the only public character who had to do with it, who seems to have had, at the time, any clear .sense of its importance, or of the results which would follow.

The belligerent operations of John Adams’s administration are

PREFACE.

always spoken of by the historians as aimed at France. They were so spoken of at the time, in print. Twelve regiments of infantry and one of cavalry were authorized to serve “ during the continuance of the existing differences with the French republic.” A considerable part of these regiments was raised. The recruits — to fight against France — were assembled at our ports on the Ohio and Mississippi; that is, they were removed so far from any points where they could be used against France. The boats which were to take them down the river, to take Orleans, a Span¬ ish post, were built and were in readiness. I have read the manu¬ script correspondence between Hamilton, the acting commander of the new army, and Wilkinson, the commander on the Ohio, with reference to this proposed attack,on Orleans. Wilkinson himself made a visit to Hamilton, to adjust the details of the campaign. This mine was ready to be sprung upon poor Spain, when the republic of the United States should make war with “the French republic.”

Two fortunate or unfortunate events, in which the War Office has been destroyed by fire, have put an end to many of the docu¬ ments which once described the details of these preparations. In those days governments did not discount their victories, nor state their plans in advance in the journals. And so John Adams’s ex¬ pedition against the Spanish town of Orleans goes into history as a part of the “French War.”

I felt that I owed something to the memory of Philip Nolan, whose name I once took unguardedly for the name of a hero of my own creation, who was supposed to live at another time. The part which the real Philip Nolan played in our history is far more important than that of many a man who has statues raised in his honor. So far as careful work among the memorials of his life would serve, I have tried to rescue him from the complete oblivion which hangs over him. He was murdered by the Spanish Govern¬ ment, who dishonored their own passport for his murder. Were such an event possible now, war within an hour would be the con¬ sequence. In the recent case of the “ Virginius,” the most angry of Cuban sympathizers did not pretend that there had been any such violation of the right of nations. But Spain was strong then, and America was weak, and Mr. Jefferson was “pacific.”

America is now strong, and Spain is weak, — how strong, and how weak, the story of the “ Virginius ” showed. If we trace

PREFACE.

events to their unconscious causes, we may say that no single day has done so much to make America strong, and to make Spain weak, as that day in 1801, when a Spanish officer, under his king’s commission, murdered Philip Nolan, bearing the same king’s pass¬ port for his lawful adventure.

The documents which illustrate this history, in the archives of San Antonio and of Austin, are very numerous. To the cordial assistance of the officers of every name, who have helped me to find and use them, I am greatly indebted. To Mr. Quintero, who gave me the full use of his rich collections in the archives of Monterey, which I have not visited, I have tried to express my obligations. But, indeed, I have received so much kind help in the preparation of this little book, from a thousand friends in the South and West, that I cannot thank them all by name. My readers owe it to them, if they gain any new light on our history, as they follow the adventures of Philip Nolan’s Friends.

Edward E. Hale.

Roxbury, Mass., Nov. 6,1876.

Contents

CHAPTER. PAGE.

I. A Parting .n

II. A Meeting.22

Chapter I. A Parting

“ Oh! saw ye not fair Inez ?

She has gone into the West,

To dazzle when the sun is down,

And rob the world of rest.”

Thomas Hood.

“ Good-by ! ”

“ Good-by, papa; ” and the poor girl waved her handker¬ chief, and broke into tears, though she had held up perfectly till now.

“ Tirez! ” cried Sancho, the blackest of all possible black men; and he shook his fist at his crew of twenty willing rowers, almost as black as he. The men gave way heartily, and in good time; the boat shot out from the levee, and in a few minutes Inez could no longer see her father’s handker¬ chief, nor he hers. Still he stood watching the receding boat, till it was quite lost among the crowd of flat-boats and other vessels in the river.

The parting, indeed, between father and daughter was such as did not often take place, even in those regions, in those times. Silas Perry, the father of this young girl, was a suecessful merchant, who had been established near forty years in the French and Spanish colony of Orleans, then a small colonial trading-post, which gave little pledge of the great city of New Orleans of to-day. He had gone there — a young New Englander, who had his fortunes to make — in the year 1763, when the King of France first gave Louisiana to his well-beloved cousin, King of Spain. Silas Perry had his fortunes to make — and he made them. He had been loyal to the cause of his own country, so soon as he heard of tea thrown over, of stamps burned in King Street, and of .effigies hanging on Liberty Tree. He had wrought gallantly with his friend and fellow-countryman, Oliver Pollock, in for¬ warding Spanish gunpowder from the king’s stores, to Wash¬ ington’s army, by the unsuspected route of the Mississippi and Ohio. He had wrought his way into the regards of suc¬ cessive Spanish governors, and had earned the respect of the more important of the French planters.

At this time the greater part of the handful of white peo¬ ple who made the ruling class in Orleans were French; and a brilliant “ society ” did the little colony maintain. But it had happened to Silas Perry, whose business had often called him to the Havana, that he had there wooed, won, and married a Spanish lady; and about the times of tea-parties, stampacts, English troops recalled from the Mississippi, and other such matters, Silas Perry had busied himself largely in estab¬ lishing his new home in Orleans, and in bringing his bride there. Here the Spanish lady was cordially made welcome by the ladies of the little court, in which governor and com¬ mandant and the rest were of Spanish appointment, though their subjects were of French blood. Here she lived quietly; and here, after ten years, she died, leaving to her husband but two children. One of them had been sent to Paris for his education, nine years before the time, when the reader sees his sister. For it is his sister, who was an infant when her mother died, whom we now see, sixteen years after, wav¬ ing her handkerchief to her father as the barge recedes from

OR, “SHOW YOUR PASSPORTS.”

the levee. Other children had died in infancy. This little Inez herself was but six months old when her mother died; and she had passed through infancy and girlhood without a mother’s care.

But her father had risen to the emergency in a New Eng¬ lander’s fashion. Not that he looked round to find a French lady to take the place of the Spanish donna. Not he. He did write home to Squam Bay, and stated to his sister Eunice the needs of the little child. He did not tell Eunice that if she came to be the child’s second mother she would exchange calls with marchionesses, would dress in silks, and ride in carriages. He knew very well that none of these things would move her. He did tell her, that, if she did not watch over the little thing in her growth, nobody else would but himself. He knew what he relied upon in saying this ; and, on the return of Captain Tucker in the schooner “ Dolores,” sure enough, the aunt of the little orphaned baby had appeared, with a very droll assortment of trunks and other baggage, in the most approved style of Squam Bay. She was herself scarcely seventeen years old when she thus changed her home ; but she had the conscientious decision to which years of struggle had trained her before her time. She loved her brother, and she was determined to do her duty by his child. To that child she had ever since been faithful, with all a mother’s care.

And so Miss Inez had grown up in a French town, under Spanish government, but with her every-day life directed under the simplest traditions of New England. With her little friends, and on any visit, she saw from day to day the habits, so utterly different from those of home, of a French colony not indisposed to exaggerate the customs of France. For language, she spoke English at home, after the fashion of the New Englanders ; but in the society of her playmates and friends she spoke French, after the not debased fashion of the Creole French of Louisiana. Through all her life, however, Louisiana had been under the Spanish rule. Silas

Perry himself spoke and read Spanish perfectly well, and he had taught Inez to use it with ease. The girl had, indeed, read no little of the masterpieces of Spanish literature, so far as, in a life not very often thwarted at home, she had found what pleased her among her father’s books.

She was now parted from him for the first time, if we except short visits on one plantation or another on the coast. The occasion of the parting was an unrelenting storm of letters and messages from her mother’s only sister, Donna Maria Dolores, the wife of a Spanish officer of high rank, named Barelo. For some years now this husband had been stationed at the frontier part of San Antonio, in the province which was beginning to take the name of Texas \ and in this little settlement Donna Maria, lonely enough herself, was making such sunshine as she could for those around her. Forlorn as such a position seems, perhaps, to people with fixed homes, it was any thing but forlorn to Donna Maria. She had lived, she said, “ the life of an Arab ” till now; and now to know that her husband was really stationed here, though the station were a frontier garrison, was to know that for the first time since her girlhood she was to have the luxury of a home.

No sooner were her household gods established, than she began, by the very infrequent “ opportunities ” for writing which the frontier permitted, to hurl the storm of letters on Silas Perry’s defenceless head. Fortunately for him, indeed, “ opportunities ” were few. This word, in the use we now make of it, is taken from the older vocabulary of New Eng¬ land, in whose language it implied a method of sending a letter outside of any mail. Just as in English novels you find people speaking of “ franks ” for letters, these older New Englanders spoke of “opportunities.” Mail between Texas and Orleans there was not, never had been, and, with the blessing of God, never would be. “ Had I the power,” said the Gov. Salcedo, “ I would not let a bird cross from Louisiana to Texas.” But sometimes a stray priest going to confer with the bishop of Orleans, sometimes a government messenger from Mexico, sometimes a concealed horse-trader, and always camps of Indians, passed the frontier eastward, on one pretext or another; and, with proper license given, there was no reason left why they should not, after Louisiana became in name a Spanish province. No such stray traveller came to the city without finding Silas Perry; and inevitably he brought a double letter, — an affectionate note to Inez, begging her to write to her mother’s sister, and an urgent and persuasive one to her . father, begging him, by all that was sacred, not to let the child grow up without knowing her mother’s only relations.

Silas Perry’s heart was still tender. If he had lived to be a thousand, he would never have forgotten the happy days in the Havana, when he wooed and won his Spanish bride, nor the loyal help that her sister Dolores gave to the wooing and to the winning. But till now he had the advantage of posses¬ sion ; and the priests and soldiers and traders always carried back affectionate letters, explaining how much Inez loved her aunt, but how impossible it was for her to come. The con¬ cocting of these letters had become almost a family joke at home.

It may help the reader’s chronology if we say that our story begins in the first year which bore the number of “ eighteen hundred; ” he may call it the last year of the eighteenth cen¬ tury, or the first of the nineteenth, as he likes to be accurate or inaccurate. At this time business required that Silas Perry should go to Paris, and leave his home for many months, perhaps for a year. Silas would gladly have taken his sister Eunice and his daughter with him ; but travel was not what it is now, nor was Paris what it is now. And although he did not think his daughter’s head would be cut off, still he doubted so far what he might find in Paris, that he shrank from taking her thither. As it happened, at this moment there came a particularly well-aimed shaft from Aunt Dolores’s armory; and fortune added an “ opportunity,” not only for reply, but for permitting Inez and her aunt to make the journey into Texas under competent escort, if they chose to sub¬ mit themselves to all the hardships of travel across prairies and through a wilderness. True, the enterprise was utterly unheard of: this did not make it less agreeable in Silas Perry’s eyes. It was not such an enterprise as Donna Maria Dolores had proposed. She had arranged that the girl should be sent with proper companionship, on one of Silas’s vessels, to Corpus Christi on the Gulf. She had promised to go down herself to meet her, with an escort.of lancers whom their friend Gov. Herrera had promised her. But Silas Perry had not liked this plan. He said boldly, that, if the girl were to ride a hundred miles, she might ride three hundred. Mr. Nolan would take better care of her than any Gov. Herrera of them all. “ Women always supposed you were sending schooners into mud-holes, where there was nothing to buy, and nothing to sell.” And so the most improbable of all possible events.took place. By way of preparation for going to Paris, Silas Perry sent his precious daughter, and his sister only less precious, on a long land-journey of adventure, to make a visit as long, at least, as his own was. It need not be said, if the reader apprehends what manner of man he was, that he had provided for her comfort, so far as fore¬ thought, lavish expenditure, and a wide acquaintance with the country, could provide for it. If he had not come to this sudden and improbable determination, this story would not have been written.

Inez, as has been said, fairly broke down as the rowers gave way. Her Aunt Eunice kept up the pretence of flying her handkerchief till they had wholly lost sight of the point of their embarkation. And then the first words of comfort which came to the sobbing girl were not from her aunt.

“Take one o’ them Boston crackers; they say they’s dread¬ ful good when you go on the water. Can’t git none all along the coast; they don’t know how to keep ’em. So soon as ye father said you was to go, I told old Tucker to bring me some from home; told him where to git ’em. Got ’em at Richardsan’s in School Street. Don’t have ’em good nowherfe elfe.”

Inez, poor child, could as easily have eaten a horseshoe as the biscuit which was thus tendered her. But she took it with 1 pleasant smile; and the words answered a better pur¬ pose than Dr. Fiavel’s homilies on contentment could have served.

The speaker was a short-set, rugged New Englander, of about sixty years of age, whose dress and appointments were in every respect curiously, not to say sedulously, different from those of the Creole French, or the Spanish seamen, or the Western flat-boatmen, all around him. Regardless of treaties, of nationalities, or of birthright privileges, Seth Ransom regarded all these people as “furriners,” and so designated them, even in the animated and indignant conver¬ sations which he held with them. He was himself a Yankee of the purest blood, who had, however, no one of the restless or adventurous traits attributed to the Yankee of fiction or of the stage. He had, it is true, followed the sea in early life. But, having fallen in with Silas Perry in Havana, he had attached himself to his service with a certain feudal loyalty. The institution of feudalism, as the philosophical student has observed, made the vassal quite as much the master of his lord as the master was of his vassal, if not more. That this was the reason why Seth Ransom served Silas Perry, it would be wrong to say. But it is true that he served him in a masterful way, as a master serves. It is also true that he idolized Inez, as he had idolized her mother before her. Of each, he was the most faithful henchman and the most loyal admirer. Yet he would address Inez personally with the intimate terms in which he spoke to her when she was a baby in his arms, — when perhaps she had been left for an hour in his happy and perfect charge. If no one else were present, he would call her “ Een,” or “ Inez,” as if she had been his own granddaughter. In the presence of others, on the other hand, no don of the Governor’s staff could have found fault with the precision of his etiquette.

i8

'The necessities of Mr. Perry’s business often sent Seth Ransom back to New England, so that he could drink again from the waters of the pump in King Street, as he still calied the State Street of to-day. It was as Hercules sometimes let Antaeus put his foot to the ground. Ransom returned from each such visit with new contempt for every thing which he found upon other shores, excepting for the household of Silas Perry, and perhaps a modified toleration for that of Oliver Pollock. For Silas Perry himself, for Miss Eunice, and Miss Inez, his chivalrous devotion blazed out afresh on each return.

He was athletic, strong, and practical. Nobody had ever found any thing he could not do, excepting that he read and wrote with such difficulty, that in practice he never descended to these arts except in the most trying emergency. When, therefore, Silas Perry determined on his rash project of send¬ ing his daughter and sister under Mr. Nolan’s escort to San Antonio, he determined, of course, to send Seth Ransom with them as their body-guard. The fact that he sent him, in truth, really relieved the enterprise from its rashness; for, though Seth Ransom had never crossed the prairies, any one who knew him, and the relation in which he stood to Miss Inez, knew that, if it were necessary, he would carry her from Natchez to the Alamo in his arms.

The boat was soon free from the little flotilla which then made all the commerce of the little port; and the steady stroke of the well-trained crew hurried her up stream with a speed that exacted the admiration of the lazy lookers-on of whatever nation.

Inez thanked her old cavalier for his attention, made him happy by asking him to find something for her in a bag which he had stowed away, and then kept him by her side.

“ Do they row as well as this in Boston Harbor, Ransom ? ” she said. For some reason unknown, Ransom was never addressed by his baptismal name.

“ Don’t have to. Ain’t many niggers there, no way. What they is lives on Nigger Hill; that’s all on one side. Yes: some niggers goes to sea, but them’s all cooks. Don’t have to row much there. Have sailboats; don’t have no rivers.”

The girl loved to hear his dialect, and was not averse to stir up his resentment against all men who had not been bom under her father’s roof, and all nations but those which ate codfish salted on Saturday.

“ I don’t see where they get their ducks, if they have no rivers,” she said artfully, as if she were thinking aloud.

“ Ducks! thousands on ’em. Big ducks too; not little critters like these. Go into Faneuil Hall Market any day, and have more ducks than you can ask for. Ducks is nothin’.” And a grim smile stole over his face, as if he were pleased that Inez had selected ducks as the precise point on which her comparison should be made.

“Well, surely, Ransom, they have no sugar-cane,” said she; and, by her eye, he saw that she was watching Sancho, the boatswain as he might be called, who, as he nodded to his men, solaced himself by chewing and sucking at a bit of fresh cane from a little heap at his side.

“ Sugar-cane ! Guess not. Don’t want ’em. Won’t touch ’em. Oceans of white sugar, all done up in sugar-loaves, jest when they want it. Them as makes sugar makes it in the woods, makes it out of trees; don’t have to have them dirty niggers make it. Oceans of sugar-loaves all the time ! ” And again that severe smile stole over his face, and he looked up into the sky, almost as if he saw celestial beings carrying purple-papered sugar-loaves to Boston, and as if — next to ducks — the supply of sugar to that town was its marked characteristic.

Eunice Perry was glad to follow the lead which Ransom had given, sagaciously or unconsciously. Any thing was better for the voyage than a homesick brooding on what they had left behind.

“ We must not make Inez discontented with Orleans and the coast, Ransom. Poor child ! she has nothing but roses and orange-blossoms, figs and bananas ; we must not tell her too much about russet apples, or she will be discontented.”

“ I do like russet apples, aunty darling, quite as well as I like figs; but I shall not be discontented while I have you on one side of me, and Ransom on the other, and dear old Sancho beating time in front.” This, with a proud expres¬ sion, as if she knew they were trying to lead her out from herself, and that she did not need to be cosseted. Old San¬ cho caught the glance, and started his rowers to new energy. To maintain a crack crew of oarsmen was one of the boasts of the “ coast ” at that time ; and, although Silas Perry was in no sort a large planter, yet he maintained the communica-. tion between his plantation above the city, and his home in the city, — which, for himself, he preferred at any season to any place of refuge, — by a crew as stalwart and as well trained as any planter of them all.

The boat on which the two ladies and their companions were embarked was not the elegant barge in which they usually made the little voyage from the plantation to their city home. It was a more business-like craft which Silas Perry had provided to carry his daughter as far as Natchi¬ toches on the Red River, where she and her companions were to join the land expedition of Philip Nolan and his friends. The after-part of the boat was protected from sun or rain by an awning or light roof, generally made of sails, or some¬ times of skins, but, in Inez’s boat, of light woodwork; it had among the habitants the name of tendelet. Under the tendelet a little deck, with the privileges of all quarter-decks, belonged to the master of the boat and his company. Here he ate his meals by day; here, if he slept on board, he spread his mattress at night. It was high enough to give a good view of the river and the low shores, of any approach¬ ing boat, or any other object of interest in the somewhat limited catalogue of river experiences. In the preparations for the voyage of the ladies, curtains had been arranged, which would screen them from either side, from the sun, from wind, or even from a shower.

OR, “SHOW YOUR PASSPORTS."

A long tarpauling, called the pielat, was stretched over the whole length of the boat, to protect the stores, the trunks, and other cargo, from the weather. The rowers sat at the sides, old Sancho watching them from the rear; while a man in the bow, called the bosman ,* who generally wielded a sort of a boat-hook, watched the course, and fended off any float¬ ing log, or watched for snag or sawyer.

The voyage this afternoon was not long. It was, as Inez said, only a “ taste-piece.” Eunice said it was as the cara¬ vans at the East go a mile out of town on the first night, so that they may the more easily send back for any thing that is forgotten.

“ All nonsense! ” said Ransom. “ I told ye father might as well start afore sunrise, and be at the Cross to-night: would not hear a word on it, and so lost all day.”

In truth, Inez was to spend her last night at the planta¬ tion, which had been her favorite summer home for years, to bid farewell to the servants there, and to gather up such of her special possessions as could be carried on the packhorses, on this pilgrimage to her Spanish aunt. Her father would gladly have come with her, but for the possibility that his ship might sail for Bordeaux early the next morning.

1 Was this word once “boatswain,” perhaps?

Chapter II. A Meeting

“Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw.”—A lexander Pope.

Before sunrise the next morning the final embarkation was to take place. The whole house was in an uproar. The steady determination of old Chloe, chief of the kitchen, that Miss Inez should eat the very best breakfast she ever saw, before she went off “to the wild Indians,” dominated the whole establishment. In this determination Chloe was steadily upheld by Ransom, who knew, by many conflicts from which he had retreated worsted, that it was idle to try to dictate to her, while at the same time he had views as decided as ever on the inferiority of French cookery to that of New England. The preparation of this master break¬ fast had called upon Chloe and her allies long before light. Caesar and his allies, also preparing for a voyage which would take them from home for many days, were as early and as noisy. The only wonder, indeed, was that the girl, who was the centre of the idolatry of them all, or her aunt, who was hardly less a favorite, could either of them sleep a wink, in the neighborhood of such clamors, after midnight passed. When they did meet at breakfast, they found the table lighted with bougies, and preparations for such a repast as if the governor and his staff, the commandant with his, and half the merchants of Orleans, had been invited. Besides Francois and Laurent, who were in regular attendance on the table, Ransom was hovering round, somewhat as a chief butler might have done in another form of luxurious civilization. ■