The little villages in which they dwelt were pretty places,[31] with wide, shaded streets.  The houses lay far apart, often a couple of hundred feet from one another.  They were built of heavy hewn timbers; those of the better sort were furnished with broad verandas, and contained large, low-ceilinged rooms, the high mantle-pieces and the mouldings of the doors and windows being made of curiously carved wood.  Each village was defended by a palisaded fort and block-houses, and was occasionally itself surrounded by a high wooden stockade.  The inhabitants were extravagantly fond of music and dancing;[32] marriages and christenings were seasons of merriment, when the fiddles were scraped all night long, while the moccasined feet danced deftly in time to the music.

Three generations of isolated life in the wilderness had greatly changed the characters of these groups of traders, trappers, bateau-men, and adventurous warriors.  It was inevitable that they should borrow many traits from their savage friends and neighbors.  Hospitable, but bigoted to their old customs, ignorant, indolent, and given to drunkenness, they spoke a corrupt jargon of the French tongue; the common people were even beginning to give up reckoning time by months and years, and dated events, as the Indians did, with reference to the phenomena of nature, such as the time of the floods, the maturing of the green corn, or the ripening of the strawberries.[33] All their attributes seemed alien to the polished army-officers of old France;[34] they had but little more in common with the latter than with the American backwoodsmen.  But they had kept many valuable qualities, and, in especial, they were brave and hardy, and, after their own fashion, good soldiers.  They had fought valiantly beside King Louis’ musketeers, and in alliance with the painted warriors of the forest; later on they served, though perhaps with less heart, under the gloomy ensign of Spain, shared the fate of the red-coated grenadiers of King George, or followed the lead of the tall Kentucky riflemen.

1.  “Travels by William Bartram,” Philadelphia, 1791, pp. 184, 231, 232, etc.  The various Indian names are spelt in a dozen different ways.

2.  Reise, etc. (in 1783 and 84), by Johann David Schopf, 1788, II. 362.  The Minorcans were the most numerous and prosperous; then came the Spaniards, with a few creoles, English, and Germans.

3.  J. D. F. Smyth, “Tour in the United States” (1775), London, 1784, II., 35.

4. Do.

5.  “Memoire ou Coup-d’Oeil Rapide sur mes differentes voyages et mon sejour dans la nation Creck, par Le Gal.  Milfort, Tastanegy ou grand chef de guerre de la nation Creck et General de Brigade au service de la Republique Francaise.”  Paris, 1802.  Writing in 1781, he said Mobile contained about forty proprietary families, and was “un petit paradis terrestre.”

6.  Bartram, 407.

7. Magazine of American History, IV., 388.  Letter of a New England settler in 1773.