‘Again, being in company with Augustin Bourgeat, Esq., we met an extraordinary large alligator in the woods whilst hunting; and, for the sake of destruction I may say, we alighted from our horses, and approached with full intention to kill it. The alligator was put between us, each of us provided with a long stick to irritate it; and, by making it turn its head partly on one side, afford us the means of shooting it immediately behind the fore leg and through the heart. We both discharged five heavy loads of duck-shot into its body, and almost all into the same hole, without any other effect than that of exciting regular strokes of the tail, and snapping of the jaws at each discharge, and the flow of a great quantity of blood out of the wound, and mouth, and nostrils of the animal; but it was still full of life and vigor, and to have touched it with the hand would have been madness; but as we were anxious to measure it, and to knock off some of its larger teeth to make powder charges, it was shot with a single ball just above the eye, when it bounded a few inches off the ground, and was dead when it reached it again. Its length was seventeen feet; it was apparently centuries old; many of its teeth measured three inches. The shot taken were without a foot only of the circle that we knew the tail could form, and our shots went _en masse_. ‘As the lakes become dry, and even the deeper connecting bayous empty themselves into the rivers, the alligators congregate into the deepest hole in vast numbers; and, to this day, in such places, are shot for the sake of their oil, now used for greasing the machinery of steam-engines and cotton mills, though formerly, when indigo was made in Louisiana, the oil was used to assuage the overflowing of the boiling juice, by throwing a ladleful into the kettle whenever this was about to take place. The alligators are caught frequently in nets by fishermen; they then come without struggling to the shore, and are killed by blows on the head given with axes. ‘When autumn has heightened the coloring of the foliage of our woods, and the air feels more rarefied during the nights and earlier part of the day, the alligators leave the lakes to seek for winter quarters, by burrowing under the roots of trees, or covering themselves simply with earth along their edges. They become then very languid and inactive, and, at this period, to sit or ride on one would not be more difficult than for a child to mount his wooden rocking-horse. The negroes, who now kill them, put all danger aside, by separating, at one blow with an axe, the tail from the body. They are afterwards cut up in large pieces, and boiled whole in a good quantity of water, from the surface of which the fat is collected with large ladles. One single man kills oftentimes a dozen or more of large alligators in the evening, prepares his fire in the woods, where he has erected a camp for the purpose, and by morning has the oil rendered.