sturb. And, indeed, the Baratarians were
not without a certain rude sense of patriotism and loyalty to the United
States, whose laws they persistently violated. For when the second war
with Great Britain was declared and Packenham was dispatched to take New
Orleans, the commander of the British fleet made overtures to Lafitte and
his men, promising them a liberal subsidy and full pardon for all past
offenses, if they would but act as his allies and guide the British
invaders to the most vulnerable point in the defenses of the Crescent
City. The offer was refused, and instead, the chief men of the pirate
colony went straightway to New Orleans to put Jackson on his guard, and
when the opposing forces met on the plains of Chalmette, the very center
of the American line was held by Dominique Yon, with a band of his swarthy
Baratarians, with howitzers which they themselves had dragged from their
pirate stronghold to train upon the British. Many of us, however
law-abiding, will feel a certain sense that the romance of history would
have been better served, if after this act of patriotism, the pirates had
been at least peacefully dispersed. But they were wedded to their
predatory life, returned with renewed zeal to their piracies, and were
finally destroyed by the State forces and a United States naval
expedition, which burned their settlement, freed their slaves, razed their
fortifications, confiscated their cannon, killed many of their people,
and dispersed the rest among the swamps and forests of southern Louisiana.

In 1809 a New York man, by name Nicholas J. Roosevelt, set out from
Pittsburg in a flatboat of the usual type, to make the voyage to New
Orleans. He carried no cargo of goods for sale, nor did he convey any band
of intended settlers, yet his journey was only second in importance to the
ill-fated one, in which the luckless Amis proved that New Orleans must be
United States territory, or the wealth of the great interior plateau would
be effectively bottled up. For Roosevelt was the partner of Fulton and
Livingston in their new steamboat enterprise, having himself suggested the
vertical paddle-wheel, which for more than a half a century was the
favorite means of utilizing steam power for the propulsion of boats. He
was firm in the belief that the greatest future for the steamboat was on
the great rivers that tied together the rapidly growing commonwealths of
the middle west, and he undertook this voyage for the purp