Mr. Walker informed me that for fourteen miles down the bayou the fall was six feet to the mile. At that distance from the Mississippi, sloop navigation commenced at a point called Hampton's Landing, from which it was about six miles to the Amite River. The Amite River was navigated by light-draught vessels from Lake Pontchartrain. The region about the Amite River possesses rich bottom-lands, and many of the descendants of the original French settlers of Louisiana own plantations along its banks. Mr. Walker then pointed to a long point of land some miles down the river, upon which the fertile fields of a plantation lay like patches of bright green velvet in the morning sun, and said: "Below that point a neighbor of mine found one of your northern boatmen dying in his boat. He rowed all the way from Philadelphia on a bet, and if he had reached New Orleans would have won his five thousand dollars, but he died when only ninety-five miles from the city, and was buried by Adonis Le Blanc on that plantation." I had heard the story before. It had been told me by the river boatmen, and the newspapers of the country had also repeated it. The common version of it was, that a poor man, desirous of supporting his large family of children, had undertaken to row on a bet from Philadelphia to New Orleans. If successful, he was to receive five thousand dollars. The kind-hearted people along the river had shown much sympathy for Mr. John C. Cloud in his praiseworthy attempts to support his suffering family, and at any time during his voyage quite a liberal sum of money might have been collected from these generous men and women to aid him in his endeavor. There was, however, something he preferred to money, and with which he was lavishly supplied, as we shall see hereafter. So much for rumor. Now let us examine facts. A short time before Mr. Cloud's death, two reporters of a western paper attempted to row to New Orleans in a small boat, but met with an untimely end, being run down by a steamboat. Their fate and Mr. Cloud's were quoted as precedents to all canoeists and boatmen, and quite a feeling against this healthful exercise was growing among the people. Several editors of popular newspapers added to the excitement by warnings and forebodings. Believing that some imprudence had been the cause of Mr. Cloud's death, and forming my opinion of him from the fact of his undertaking such a voyage in August,--the season when the swamps are full of malaria,--I took the trouble to investigate the case, and made some discoveries which would have startled the sympathetic friends of this unfortunate man.