File:Historical sketch book and guide to New Orleans and environs, with map - illustrated with many original engravings, and containing exhaustive accounts of the traditions, historical legends, and (14782003455).jpg

Identifier: historicalsketch00hear (find matches)
Title: Historical sketch book and guide to New Orleans and environs, with map : illustrated with many original engravings, and containing exhaustive accounts of the traditions, historical legends, and remarkable localities of the Creole city
Year: 1885 (1880s)
Authors: Hearn, Lafcadio, 1850-1904 Pennell, Joseph, 1857-1926
Subjects:
Publisher: New York : W.H. Coleman
Contributing Library: University of Connecticut Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Boston Library Consortium Member Libraries

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, finding life far pleasanter up at the cabarets in the city, and reasoning, verycorrectly, too, that if the enemys ships could sail up the Mississippi River against the current,contrary winds, etc., nothing that they could do with their rusty old guns would have the leasteffect in delaying them. In the rear of the town, commanding the entrance of Bayou St. John, stood and stands tothis very day, a small fort of brick and earth, now newly painted and repaired, and debased tothe condition of a restaurant. A few old guns lie around the yard as mementoes, as usefulthere as they ever were in the old days, for no enemy more dangerous than some predatorygar-fish in the bayou, ever disturbed the sleepy quiet of old Fort St. John. If some adventurous enemy had attacked the fort, silenced its guns, stormea its walls, andthen triumphantly dragged his boats over the three-foot bar at the mouth of the bayou, inhow much better a condition would he have been ? A few miles of weary strugling through
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Cf^Eoue,C°^G^ GUIDE TO NEW ORLEANS. 173 the shallow, mnddy stream, and he would have found himself in a dismal, unfathomable cypressswamp, the resort of alligators, lepers, thieves and runaway negroes. If he got his men safelythrough this without any loss from the army of mosquitoes that hung upon his flanks, he wouldhave found himself, after all his journey, standing on the Congo field, where of a Sunday nightor on St. Johns eve, the negroes used to dance the Youdou dance, with the walls of the cityrising before him, cannon frowning at him from the embrasures, and soldiers ready to join issuewith him. Genuine walls were there too, with a regular fosse in front like all Europeanfortresses, forty feet wide by seven deep ; somewhat choked up, it is true, with weeds and grassand seemmg to offer a secure footing, but which would treacherouslv have plunged any enemythat had attempted to cross, save by the regular bridges, into the slime and mud at the bottom,the victim of poisonous conger

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