us--stretches backward into the dim
twilight before tradition, its sole remaining record graven upon the
surface of the earth, vaguely guessed at by those who study graves;
their pathetic ending has long been pictured in our country's story as
occurring amid the shadows of that dreadful midnight upon the banks of
the Ocatahoola, when vengeful Frenchmen put them to the sword. Whence
they came, whether from fabled Atlantis, or the extinct Aztec empire of
the South, no living tongue can tell; whither fled their remnant,--if
remnant there was left to flee,--and what proved its ultimate fate, no
previous pen has written. Out from the darkness of the unknown,
scarcely more than spectral figures, they came, wrote their single line
upon the earth's surface, and vanished, kings and people alike sinking
into speechless oblivion.

That Geoffrey Benteen witnessed the tragic ending of this strange
people I no longer question; for I have compared his narrative with all
we moderns have learned regarding them, as recorded in the pages of
Parkman, Charlevoix, Du Pratz, and Duponceau, discovering nothing to
awaken the slightest suspicion that he dealt with other than what he
saw. More, I have traced with exactitude the route these fugitives
followed in their flight northward, and, although the features of the
country are greatly altered by settlements of nearly two hundred years,
one may easily discern evidence of this man's honesty. For me it is
enough to feel that I have stood beside the massive tomb of this
mysterious people--a people once opulent and powerful, the warriors of
forgotten battle-fields, the builders of lost civilizations, the
masters of that imperial domain stretching from the Red River of the
North to the sea-coast of the Carolinas; a people swept backward as by
the wrath of the Infinite, scourged by famine, decimated by pestilence,
warred against by flame, stricken by storm, torn asunder by vengeful
enemies, until a weakened remnant, harassed by the French sword, fled
northward in the night to fulfil the fate ordained of God, and finally
perished amid the gloomy shadows of the grim Ozarks, bequeathing to the
curious future neither a language nor a name.

But this I leave with Geoffrey Benteen, and turn to my own simpler
task, a review of the peculiar circumstances leading up to this
narrative, involving a brief chapter from the records of our Southwest.

The early history of the Province of Louisiana is so compl