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In her mansion Maturin Bruneau was treated as an adopted son, and lived in great splendour until, in 1796, a letter arrived from Charles de Vezin, the brother of the baron, who had just returned to France, and who informed the viscountess that she had been imposed upon, for the only nephew he ever possessed was at that time an emigrant refugee in England.
Years ago his emigrant team had broken down in this wild but wooded defile of the Sierras, and he had been forced to a winter encampment, with only a rude log-cabin for shelter, on the very verge of the promised land.
She too was from France: at least, not from Normandy or Paris, like Alix, but, like Françoise's young aunt with the white hair, a German of Alsace, from a village near Strasbourg; like her, an emigrant, and, like Françoise, a voyager with father and sister by flatboat from old New Orleans up the Mississippi, down the Atchafalaya, and into the land of Attakapas.
One morning we went to the emigrant sheds to see several hundred Icelanders embark in their flat-bottomed boats, with their quaint wooden chests, on their way to Gimli. On another occasion we helped to organize a Sunday-school festival, and after giving the children an unlimited supply of cake, strawberries, and lemonade, we amused them with some tableaux.
The European emigrant always lands, therefore, in a country which is but half full, and where hands are in request: he becomes a workman in easy circumstances; his son goes to seek his fortune in unpeopled regions, and he becomes a rich landowner. The former amasses the capital which the latter invests, and the stranger as well as the native is unacquainted with want.
Faye is having the rear half padded with straw and canvas on the sides and bottom, and the high top will be of canvas drawn over "bows," in true emigrant fashion. Our tent will be folded to form a seat and placed in the back, upon which I can sit and look out through the round opening and gossip with the mules that will be attached to the wagon back of me. Cagey will sit by the driver.
The Illinois lodges were shaped like the rounded cover of an emigrant wagon, high, and very long, having an opening left along the top for the escape of smoke. They were made of rush mats, which the women wove, overlapped as shingles on a framework of poles. Rush mats also carpeted the ground, except where fires burned in a row along the middle.
"There's the trail where Frémont and we fellows came in, the second time, winter of Forty-five. Yon river's the North Branch of the American. I remember that gap, there. What that camp is I don't know; but we'll find out." "This is an emigrant trail, then, too, isn't it?" queried Charley's father. "It'll be the main emigrant trail, or I'm much mistaken."
It was the culmination of a plot, with some reason behind more important than ordinary robbery. Apparently the wagons contained nothing of value, merely the clothing, provisions, and ordinary utensils of an emigrant party. Nor had the victims' pockets been carefully searched. Only the mules had been taken by the raiders, and they would be small booty for such a crime.
And, besides, the whole eastern coast of America, within the temperate zone, was still to be had for the taking. With such a magnificent opportunity, why was the result so meagre? A complete answer to this query would lead us far afield, but the whole history of New France bears witness to the fact that the cause of failure is not to be found in the individual French emigrant.
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