Strange True Stories of Louisiana
Page 27
V.
THE LOST ORPHANS.
The prospective journey was the same that we saw Suzanne and Francoise,Joseph and Alix, take with toil and danger, yet with so much pleasure, in1795. The early company went in a flatboat; these went in a round-bottomboat. The journey of the latter was probably the shorter. Its adventureshave never been told, save one line. When several weeks afterwards theboat returned, it brought word that Daniel Mueller had one day dropped deadon the deck and that his little son had fallen overboard and was drowned.The little girls had presumably been taken on to their destination bywhoever had been showing the way; but that person's name and residence, ifany of those left in New Orleans had known them, were forgotten. Only thewide and almost trackless region of Attakapas was remembered, and bypeople to whom every day brought a struggle for their own existence.Besides, the children's kindred were bound as redemptioners.
Those were days of rapid change in New Orleans. The redemptioners workedtheir way out of bondage into liberty. At the end of a year or two thosewho had been taken to plantations near by returned to the city. The townwas growing, but the upper part of the river front in faubourg Ste. Marie,now in the heart of the city, was still lined with brick-yards, andthitherward cheap houses and opportunities for market gardening drew theemigrants. They did not colonize, however, but merged into the communityabout them, and only now and then, casually, met one another. YoungSchuber was an exception; he throve as a butcher in the old French market,and courted and married the young Eva Kropp. When the fellow-emigrantsoccasionally met, their talk was often of poor shoemaker Mueller and hislost children.
No clear tidings of them came. Once the children of some Germans who haddriven cattle from Attakapas to sell them in the shambles at New Orleanscorroborated to Frank Schuber the death of the father; but where Salomeand Dorothea were they could not say, except that they were in Attakapas.
Frank and Eva were specially diligent inquirers after Eva's lost godchild;as also was Henry Mueller up in or near Woodville, Mississippi. He and hisboys were, in their small German way, prospering. He made such effort ashe could to find the lost children. One day in the winter of 1820-21 hesomehow heard that there were two orphan children named Miller--theMuellers were commonly called Miller--in the town of Natchez, somethirty-five miles away on the Mississippi. He bought a horse and wagon,and, leaving his own children, set out to rescue those of his deadbrother. About midway on the road from Woodville to Natchez theHomochitto Creek runs through a swamp which in winter overflows. In hereMueller lost his horse. But, nothing daunted, he pressed on, only to findin Natchez the trail totally disappear.
Again, in the early spring of 1824, a man driving cattle from Attakapas toBayou Sara told him of two little girls named Mueller living in Attakapas.He was planning another and bolder journey in search of them, when he fellill; and at length, without telling his sons, if he knew, where to findtheir lost cousins, he too died.
Years passed away. Once at least in nearly every year young DanielMiller--the "u" was dropped--of Woodville came down to New Orleans. At suchtimes he would seek out his relatives and his father's and uncle's oldfriends and inquire for tidings of the lost children. But all in vain.Frank and Eva Schuber too kept up the inquiry in his absence, but nobreath of tidings came. On the city's south side sprung up the new city ofLafayette, now the Fourth District of New Orleans, and many of theaforetime redemptioners moved thither. Its streets near the river becamealmost a German quarter. Other German immigrants, hundreds and hundreds,landed among them and in the earlier years many of these wereredemptioners. Among them one whose name will always be inseparable fromthe history of New Orleans has a permanent place in this story.