who were being transported from Florida to the Indian Territory. Their chief, the famously cruel "Billy Bowlegs," was with them, and so violent were the people on shore in their threats that the captain of the steamboat did not dare to approach the shore. He was wise, as many in that excitable crowd, myself among the number, had had relatives cruelly tortured and murdered by these same Indians in the Seminole War. My uncle, Bedford Morgan, was one of their victims, having been scalped and his body so horribly mutilated that it was only recognized by the dog stood guard over it.
In those days there were still Indians in Louisiana. A band of "Choctaws" lived on the Amite River, a few miles back of Baton Rouge, who used to bring into the town, for sale or barter, their bead-and basket-work and blow-guns made out of cane poles. The arrows of these blow-guns were made of split cane with a tuft of thistle at one end and we boys delighted in the ownership of these long and apparently harmless weapons. I say apparently harmless, but in the hands of an Indian they were very deadly to birds and squirrels. The Indians were wonderful shots with them and at twenty or thirty paces could hit a small silver five-cent piece; always provided they were promised the coin if they hit it.
I have a vivid recollection of a tragedy which happened in those days which often troubles the dreams of my old age. I was an eye-witness of the blowing-up and destruction by fire of the Princess, the finest steamboat on the Mississippi in those days.
The night before the disaster my father and mother had kissed me good-bye and gone on board of an old dismantled steamboat, which answered the purposes of a wharf, to await the arrival of the Princess, as they intended to take passage on her for New Orleans. Early the next morning I went down to the river to find out if they had yet left. The Princess had just drawn out into the stream, and as I stood watching her as
