From New Orleans to San Fransisco in '49 [pp. 189-205]

From iVew Orleans to Sail Frnncisco ini'9v.
not sleep, but tossed about as much
as we could in our cramped position.
The longest night has its end. Morn
came, and the boatmen jumped out
and unmoored the boat so as to go on.
My brother tried to make them understand that we did not want to go
farther till our parents' canoe came up.
But they either did not understand or
did not want to stop. So they went
on until nine o'clock, when they came
to quite an open place, which was
somewhat higher than the country
through which we had been traveling.
Here the canoe was hauled up to the
river's bank, and we all got out and
waited for the missing canoe, which
made its appearance at ten o'clock.
Mother had passed an anxious night
on our account, but she said that we
must not stop, for father was suffering
so that we must hasten to Gorgona.
So we ate a hasty lunch and started
on our way. It rained more on this
our second day on the river, and consequently was not quite so hot. The
scenery was like that we had passed
through the day before, except that in
the afternoon we passed several habitations. At one of these places mother
bought some milk from an old negro
woman who could speak English. This
woman said that she had come to the
Isthmus from Cuba, and that at one
time she had been a slave in the State
of Mississippi. She brought us a gourd
full of cooked rice to eat with our
milk; and said that although she had
been living there six years, we were
the first American children that she
had seen on the Isthmus.
We were anxious to gather some of
the many lovely flowers that we had
seen growing on the banks of the river,
and now, as we stopped to eat our
lunch, we thought that we should have
an opportunity. But the old negress
told mother that there were many
poisonous flowers growing on the Isthmus, and as we would not know which
they were, we had better not pick any
kind of flowers. This was a great disappointment to us, the flowers were so
plentiful and so lovely.
That night we came to a little village
and we wanted to camp ashore; but the
inhabitants, saying that a party of
Americans camping there the night before had shot a young native boy, forbade us to land. By the description
given of the men we knew that they
were not Americans, but a company of
Englishmen that had come with us from
New Orleans. I do not know why they
had shot the boy, for the natives seemed
to be very kind and inoffensive.
The third day the water in the river
seemed to be very shallow, and the
canoes would stick in the mud or sand.
The boatmen, one on each side of the
canoe, would then stick long poles into
the bottom of the river, and by pushing
on them force the canoe ahead as far as
possible; then they would repeat this
operation until the canoe was free from
the mud. When this method failed, the
men would jump out and drag the canoe
off. I was always afraid to see them
jump out in this manner, lest they be
taken by some of the many alligators to
be seen; having heard people say at
home that alligators were very fond of
negroes.
On the fourth day we arrived at Gorgona. Three nights and four days in
our cramped positions, in that hot climate, with none of us well, and father
and baby so very sick, was something
dreadful to endure, and made the canoes
seem like instruments of torture.
Though father's bed had been made as
comfortable as possible in the narrow
space in which it had to be placed, having clean linen sheets slipped under him
each day, he was so emaciated and his
sufferings were so intense that the hot
bed was a veritable place of torment to
him. We still had his cot with us, and
when he was taken out of the canoe and
placed on this, he said that he felt so
196
[Aug.