facilities for accumulating money—­a wealthy and intelligent population.  This calculation was sadly disappointed.  The mildness of the climate and the fruitfulness of the soil combined to enervate, instead of stimulating them to active industry, without which there can be no prosperity for any country.  A few acres, though half cultivated, were found sufficient to yield an ample support, and the mildness of the climate required but little provision for clothing.  Here, in this Eden upon earth, these people continued to live in a simplicity of primitive ignorance and indolence scarcely to be believed by any but an actual observer.  Their implements of agriculture were those of two centuries before.  More than half the population wore wooden shoes, when they wore any at all.  Their wants were few, and were all supplied at home.  Save a little flour, powder, and shot, they purchased nothing.  These were paid for by the sale of the produce of the poultry-yard—­the prudent savings from the labor of the women—­to the market-boats from the city.

There were, at the period of which I write, but half a dozen Americans upon the bayou.  These had found the country illy adapted to the growth of cotton, and some of them had commenced the planting of sugar-cane.  The results from this were very satisfactory, and consequently stimulating to the enterprise of men of means, who felt they could be more profitably employed in this new culture than in cotton, even in the very best cotton regions.

There was one man of high intelligence and long experience who denied this—­Stephen Duncan, of Natchez—­and the subsequent experience of many brought bitter regret that they had not yielded to the counsels of Dr. Duncan.

The great flood of 1828 had not touched the La Fourche or Teche, while the entire alluvial plain above had been covered many feet, and for many months.  This was the most terrible inundation, perhaps, ever experienced in that region; and every one appeared to be now satisfied that to continue to cultivate lands already reduced to man’s dominion, or to open and prepare any more, subject to this scourge, was madness.  Hence the emigration from this chosen section to the new El Dorado.  Lands rose rapidly in South Louisiana as an effect of this, while above, in the flooded district, they were to be bought for almost a nominal price.  Those who ventured to purchase these and reduce them to cultivation realized fortunes rapidly; for there was not a sufficient flood to reach them again for ten years.  The levees by this time had become so extended as to afford almost entire immunity against the floods of annual occurrence.  The culture of sugar received a new impetus and began rapidly to increase, and capital came flowing in.  Population of an industrious and hardy character was filling up the West, and the demand from that quarter alone was equal to the production, and both were increasing so rapidly as to induce the belief that it would be