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Sometimes he sends the storm, and then gives notice. This is mere playfulness on his part: it is all one to him. His great power is in the low pressure. On the Bexar plains of Texas, among the hills of the Presidio, along the Rio Grande, low pressure is bred; it is nursed also in the Atchafalaya swamps of Louisiana; it moves by the way of Thibodeaux and Bonnet Carre.
Meantime, accompanied by a tender, Fuller on the Queen entered Grand Lake on the 13th, expecting his two armed steamers to follow. On the morning of the 14th the Federal gunboats from Berwick's Bay appeared, and Fuller, dispatching the tender up the Atchafalaya to hasten his steamers, prepared for action, as he doubtless would have done in presence of Admiral Farragut's fleet. A shell set fire to the Queen, and Fuller with his crew was captured. On the 20th the enemy's gunboats, assisted by four companies of infantry, captured Butte
From the Arkansas to the Gulf, from the Atchafalaya to the Rio Grande there was no longer a Union soldier, save the insignificant garrison kept at Brownsville to preserve the semblance of that foothold in Texas for the sake of which so much blood and treasure had been spilled into this sink of shame.
Not only was there then no particular object in moving beyond the Atchafalaya, but any advance in that direction would have exposed his little corps to disaster on account of the great facilities afforded by the numberless streams for a movement by detachments of the enemy into his rear.
Major left Washington on the 10th of June, marched twenty-eight miles to Morgan's Ferry, by a road then high and dry although in April Banks had found it under water, and crossing the Atchafalaya on the 14th rode along the Bayou Fordoche with the intention of striking the river at the Hermitage; but a broken bridge turned him northward round the sweep of False River toward Waterloo.
Then Kirby Smith, not caring as yet to venture across the Atchafalaya, ordered Taylor to take Walker's division back into Northern Louisiana and try to break up Grant's campaign by interrupting his communications opposite Vicksburg; but this attempt turned out badly, for Grant had already given up his communications on the west bank of the Mississippi and restored them on the east, and Taylor's forces, after passing from Lake Catahoula by Little River into the Tensas, ascending that stream to the neighborhood of Richmond and occupying that town on the 3d of May, were roughly handled on the 7th in an ill-judged attempt to take Young's Point and Milliken's Bend.
She lingered three years, and at the end of that time passed peaceably away in the arms of her brother, the last words on her lips being 'Leonard! my child!" So we make way for the bright and happy story of how Françoise made Evangeline's journey through the dark wilds of Atchafalaya.
Their rafts were about twenty feet square, and in front of an improvised shelter earth had been placed, on which they built their fire. The current running down the Atchafalaya was very swift, the Mississippi showing a predilection in that direction, which needs only to be seen to enforce the opinion of that river's desperate endeavors to find a short way to the Gulf.
I sat beside him as his brave spirit passed away. The old "Fatherland" sent no bolder horseman to battle at Rossbach or Gravelotte. During this long retreat of two hundred miles from the banks of the Atchafalaya to Mansfield, I had been in correspondence with General Kirby Smith at Shreveport, and always expressed my intention to fight as soon as reënforcements reached me.
Returning then, to our camp at Baton Rouge, after a few days' rest, we were suddenly divided into two forces, one marching down through the country, to engage the enemy at New Iberia, and the rest of us sent around by water and up through the Atchafalaya to intercept and cut them to pieces. It was only a partial success.
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