| Show do va V ff a bif vif k wherein the fabulous past of louisiana lives lires again APOLEON III messing NAPOLEON around germany with the franco prussian war an experiment e peri ment in arrogance Z that cost him his crown annihilating the second empire while making a rc on german soil halted sit it the lie house of a farmer and put up tip for the night light occupying the guest aest room came the dawn out rolled his majesty crying aloud for coffee which the granger berr cook himself served courteously declining ng all offers of french gold in payment thereupon the visiting emperor drew from his waistcoat a silver futi full jeweled watch made a sedate bow and handed it to ills his host following sedan Ka napoleon ni III A abdicated dica ted the german and his frau frail sailed for the united states settled in wisconsin and raised a family consisting of two sons and one daughter removing to storehouse morehouse parish louisiana while the children were yet in shorts sli orts albert the eldest son famous as one of the finest horsemen and best pistol shots of his time died in ills his twenty sev anth year iierman herman the second son after running the gauntlet of frontier activities through ills early youth finally went into the lumber aber business penetrating regions where virgin forests of cyprus until ills his coming swamp guarded against invasion fell to his ax and saw brave pioneer days here in houma in the midst of ills his family eD enjoying joyin tile the well earned repose that is ills his due I 1 came upon I 1 the conqueror of the cyprus swamps 1 heard his stories of the brave brane old days when the pioneers trekked into new neu places and grappled with nature in the raw and marveled that so dramatic an era could be reviewed with such casual unconcern indeed hermann cook for all the emotion lie he displayed lolling on an easy chair recording those heroic yesterdays might just as well have been chatting about a new way to bo boll 11 an egg but to me it was like having an interview with marco polo or daniel goone boone when my brother albert and I 1 were kids up in More ilu bouse parish lie he slid said it was a country set in a wilderness not yet exploit explored ed a dominion crawling with wild game of every sort anft indigenous to that zone the men were giants in stature and in spirit and the wo women fit mates to share with them tile the ordeals of life we shot deer on oil our front porches bear in the backyard squirrels quail fox fos coons possum and the like by the cartload horsemanship and the use of firearms was second nature my brother albert mounted could run down a deer at full ful I 1 gallop seize the creature by the antlers anglers and cut its throat gigantic wild boars baars the swamps in morehouse parish were literally alive with wild logs I 1 have seen razor backs in countless numbers wallowing and swimming the bayous the surface of the water broken as tar far as aa the eye could reach some of these animals especially the boars baars weighing close to pounds in my boyhood I 1 saw one that weighed at least 1500 it Is a curious fact that a swimming wild hog bog it if suddenly stricken with panic hilll lash out its front feet with such violence and rapidity as to cut its own throat and bleed to death not however until engaged in lumbering cyprus logs did I 1 come to appreciate the mighty forces of nature ci or the vastness of the outdoors with W ith a crew of negroes numbering b eight or nitie nine hundred I 1 felled and brought out of 0 storehouse and terrebonne Terrp Terre bonne bourie parishes feet ot of logs per annum for a period of 11 years building hundreds of miles of canals and clearing ID endless bayous cypress kings loss on one occasion while hauling SO CO 00 fout foot trees through the on a foot cable running over a drum under steam power the logs log gs stuck and started to sink powerless to save either tile the logs or the cable there was no alternative but to let go all holds and give up within the hour those SO 80 logs anti and feet of l inch cable the latter iter weighing about six sir tons hail bail completely disappeared the end i vanishing into the mud like a mighty angle worn worm returning to its lair total loss 2000 that was in terrebonne parish where I 1 cleared a cyprus stand 17 miles long iong by three wide it was there that we captured with the steam shovel a pound loggerhead turtle from which ten men over a period of five days had three meals a day we know the monster was concealed in the muddy depths until lie came up in the jaws of tile the scoop some fishing ill il say and those were days when one man could stow two pounds of meat at every meal which means SOO I 1 00 1 pounds 0 of f mammoth terrapin out of one shell copyright service |
