THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
777
Less than a year ago it was my good fortune to make the entire tour of the big, beautiful, and infinitely varied State of Louisiana. Less sensational than a journey into darkest Africa or a race over the globe, it was a long story of unique experiences.
With only a small colored lad to drive my wiry little Creole ponies, and a compass and map for a guide, I visited each one of our thirty-nine parishes. Traveling in a buggy, or often in a canoe, or even on that mercurial craft whose equanimity is as susceptible as that of a spirit level—I mean, a pirogue—the journey covered nearly eighteen hundred miles. It extended from the fated Island of the Cheniere Caminada, wrapped in its scarf of sand, to the high red hills of Caddo parish, touching shoulders with Arkansas; from the cypress swamp of the east boundaries to the salt licks and long levels of prairie that margin the shores of the Texan Sabine.
Sometimes, through the pine forests, it meant thirty miles from house to house; sometimes it meant a pallet on the floor, sweet potatoes, and bacon; sometimes it meant a bed a prince of the blood royal had slept in and trapped champagne. But whatever the material environment, on every hearth there burned the torch of hospitality that, come good fortune or ill, never goes out while the home walls hold together.
Once our buggy broke down in a dismal swamp, and I had to walk out of it nine miles. Once we were taken for patent medicine show people. But wherever I went I only gathered more facts to prove that Louisiana is the best poor man’s country, and that on its lands and under its sky no one need feel the biting teeth of hunger, the quick of poverty, or know the lack of home comforts.
Louisiana is vaguely but popularly supposed to be composed of swamps, Spanish moss, and alligators—three things that, by the way, have an appreciable market value. My colored friends assure me that a nice boiled alligator’s tail is very good eating; in fact, I know that it is a sort of mock pork, and the amphibian’s skin is reserved only for the use of the rich. Spanish moss, that hangs our great cave-like forests with its airy stalactites, is worth from three to seven cents a pound, and time and time again have I seen a colored woman snatch up a large bundle of it from her fence and rush off to the little cross-roads store to exchange it there for green coffee or gin. Perhaps all of you have stood in the superb vestibule of the Forestry Building, with its amber walls inlaid with onyx-colored panels of “curly” cypress. It is a hall fit for a king. Less than eighteen months ago all of it was the heart of a moss-hung Louisiana swamp.
These beautiful woods—the world’s future strong ships, casks for its most precious wines, cabinets for its loveliest gems, homes for its richest people—these, lying undisturbed in forest primeval, these are the unquarried Canovas, and quite as precious, of Louisiana.
That beautiful vestibule is the enterprise of a Northern firm, who are thriftily buying up timber lands all over the South, knowing it is inevitably the site of the future factory and the future mill.
So you see, if we do have swamps, Spanish moss and alligators, they yield us money as readily as Aladdin’s lamp gave him gold. If one should try to paint the picture of Louisiana it would be as difficult a task as trying to write the great American novel. Too many conditions and phases of life are American to be compressed into the limits of one story! Too many geographical features belong to the great Southern state to be artistically placed on one canvas.
High hills, rocks and marbles, gushing waterfalls, mineral springs, rolling uplands, clover pastures, boundless prairies, traveled by wild ponies, pine forests like great green cathedrals, cypress swamps all hung with weeping moss, salt sea marshes, long sand dunes, sluggish bayous, brooks like crystal—all these are Louisiana. The alligator and the turtle, the mocking-bird and the linnet, the pompano and the brook- trout, the quail and the papabotte, the deer and the bear—all these are Louisiana.
The squalor of the cabin, the comfort of the prosperous home, the splendor of the old historic mansion—all these are Louisiana. We have almost the oldest towns in the Union, and millions of acres that no spade has ever touched. We have a culture incomparable, and an ignorance almost incomparable, but between these two is a