THE CONGRESS OE WOMEN.
779
I should like to say a word about the tenant or share system. Any large planter will rent a man, black or white, a farm of, say, forty acres. On it will be a house, a mule, a plow, harness and garden tools. It includes the right to free fuel. The rent is half the man’s crop. That is, if he makes four bales of cotton, two go to the planter. This liberal system exists, I believe, nowhere else in the world. It offers to every immigrant a chance for a home and a fortune.
A great many good things are free in Louisiana. In one of the pine land parishes there is a great salt well. If one touches a match to this water it flames up over all its surface and burns for several seconds. The neighboring farmers collect annually at this well, boil huge kettles of the water, and by this entirely simple, primitive and picturesque process get salt enough to savor life.
Louisiana is waiting to be cut up into small holdings, just as it is waiting with all its fallow fields for the young owners and the new, brave, blood that is to come to it from all parts of the country. These Corydons and Phyllises will grow crops for the central factory; they will have market gardens, orchards, dairy farms and poultry yards. They will grow flowers and make honey.
Splendid, indeed, are the stories of what young women have done in Louisiana. It is a record of bravery worthy of a state that allows a woman to be captain of a steamboat—Captain Mary Miller; of a state that builds a great monument to the memory of a woman who never had on a kid glove in all her life, who could not write her own name, who was only great in her goodness. I mean Margaret Haughery, the baker woman, whose loaves built asylums and yet feed thousands of hungry ones.
A few years ago a family owning prairie land in Cameron Parish built themselves a home on it. The nearest neighbor was fifteen miles, the nearest tree four miles. In February they took possession and in July of that year I visited them. The cottage was canopied with roses, and phlox and zennias, carnations and geraniums splashed all the garden walks with bloom. In the kitchen garden where six months since had been only "wild hay, corn, tomatoes, ochra, potatoes, egg plants, peas, beans, pumpkins, beets, lettuce and melons grew, equal to the best I have seen at this fair. Two young girls had made that garden, and their sweet faces it was, I reckon, that coaxed from Mother Earth this tribute of all her graces.
Not far from Jennings is a little estate of one hundred and sixty acres, a cottage of three rooms, a few r fruit trees, good fences, and all about waving fields of that most beautiful crop, rice. This is the rice farm of a girl squatter, a young Iowa woman, who, with her sixteen-year-old brother came South, took up one hundred and sixty acres of government land, and whose first rice crop paid her $1,200. Her nearest neighbor is another girl farmer who got her land the same way, and who is growing an orchard that already yields her a comfortable living.
Here in Chicago there lives a young dressmaker w r ho saved up enough money to buy twenty acres of land in Louisiana and to start a poultry farm on a small scale. She sent her mother and brother to run the farm, and so successful have they been that this year she is to resign from “ seam and gusset and band,” and go south to its pine-scented hills, its flower-set hedges, its glorious, generous climate, where, raising her strawberries and early peas for Chicago millionaires, she shall meantime live like a little autocrat on her own principality. All along the line of the Illinois Central road, when it reaches Mississippi and Louisiana, are fruit and vegetable farms managed by women, most of them‘new comers. A young lady told me how she was one day packing her berries for the Chicago market when she ran out of clover. “I just went to an old mint bed under the parlor window and cut mint and covered my boxes with that,” said she. ‘‘To my surprise my Chicago merchant sent me back a dollar for the mint. During the rest of the year I shipped him fifteen dollars’ worth of mint and ten dollars’ worth of camelias.”
On an old plantation just below New Orleans there lives a woman who had this house but no money. She could not eat, wear or read her queer old gabled home, but she sold her camelias and has been twice to Europe on the profits. These are grand