called "his people" as if he were the chief of the tribe. Shortly penetrating again into the Creek nation, he again began to intrigue for the breaking up of the good understanding which was at last beginning to be established between the savages and the United States, stirred up all the elements of discord and unquiet, and even levied open war upon his enemies, taking the fort at St. Mark's and plundering Panton's store there.

But the end of his world-wide rovings and multiplied and outrageous crimes approached. A large reward being secretly offered for his capture, he was suddenly seized in 1803, at a great Indian feast got up for the purpose, pinioned, and sent down the Tombigbee under guard of a canoe's crew of warriors. His guard falling asleep in the night, the ready prisoner gnawed apart his rope fetters, crept to the canoe, paddled across the river, and fled away into the canebrake. But by unaccountable oversight omitting to set the canoe adrift, his captors, awaking early, spied it on the other side, swam the river, followed in his trail, seized him once more before noon, and carried him to Mobile. Thence he was sent to Havana, and after some years, ended in the dungeons of the Moro, a life of as romantic, varied, and desperate adventure; of as mingled and incongruous genius, fortitude, boldness, dexterity, debauchery, and crime, as perhaps ever fell to the lot of man,

THE NAPOLEONIST REFUGEES.

301

Long after the end of the career of McGillivray and Milfort, when the territory of Alabama had been organized, and when the Indian title to large portions of their hereditary lands had been extinguished, still another band of Frenchmen made a persevering, though ill-conducted and abortive effort to establish themselves upon those fertile regions.

Considerable numbers of Napoleonist refugees, driven from France after the imprisonment of the great Emperor at St. Helena, had gathered to Philadelphia, among whom were men of ability and eminence, and many lovely and accomplished women. Count Lefévre Desnouettes had been a lieutenantgeneral of cavalry under Bonaparte; had been present at the terrific siege of Saragossa; and had accompanied his master in the frightful retreat from Moscow. Handsome, graceful, and active, he was the most splendid horseman of his time. Napoleon was much attached to him, gave him many gifts, and procured for him to wife the sister of the wealthy banker Lafitte. At Fontainebleau, it was Desnouettes whom Napoleon embraced for all the officers in testimony of the affection and sorrow with which he parted from them on his way to his exile at Elba.

Colonel Nicolas Raoul, another of Napoleon's veterans, had accompanied his master to Elba; and when he escaped thence, had commanded the little advanced guard of the slender army with which the

emperor set out upon the famous triumphant progress from Cannes to Paris. Raoul was a large and noble-looking man, irascible and obstinate, and a fearless and impetuous soldier. His wife, a beautiful Neapolitan, marchioness of Sinibaldi, had been a lady of honor at the court of Murat's wife, Queen Caroline of Naples.

Marshal Grouchy, a middle-sized and unmilitary looking man, although also in Philadelphia, was unpopular with the refugees, who imputed to him the loss of the field of Waterloo, on which subject he waged a newspaper war with them; and for which, or other reasons, he did not himself come to Alabama, although one of his sons, a captain in the French army, afterwards did.

General Count Bertrand Clausel, who had served with success throughout Bonaparte's campaigns; Henry L'Allemand, lieutenant-general of artillery of the imperial guard, who married a niece of Stephen Girard; his brother Charles; Col. J. J. Cluis, formerly aid to Lefèbvre, Marshal Duke of Rovigo, secretary to the same when afterwards chief of the police of Paris, and who at one time had had charge of Napoleon's royal prisoner, Ferdinand the Seventh of Spain; were also among the refugee French at Philadelphia.

Several men of civil or literary reputations were also there at the same time; among whom were

Peniers, who, as a member of the National Assembly, had voted for the death of Lewis the Sixteenth; Lackanal, who had done the like, and who had afterwards been at the head of the Department of Public Instruction under Napoleon; Simon Chaudron, whose residence at Philadelphia was a well-known resort for the polite and witty, whose literary powers and attainments were great, and who had acquired no inconsiderable reputation as editor, poet, writer and speaker; and others.

These gentlemen deputed Nicholas S. Parmentier to obtain from Congress a grant of territory somewhere upon the public domain, upon which they intended to establish a colony, which was done March 4th, 1817, by the votes of that body, authorizing them to purchase four townships, at two dollars an acre, on a credit of fourteen years; the only other condition being that they should introduce and practise the cultivation of the vine and the olive; a stipulation from which their association was often named "The Vine and Olive Company."

After some exploration and correspondence, it was determined to settle near the junction of the Black Warrior and Tombigbee Rivers; and the company, of three hundred and forty grantees, each entitled to a share of from eighty to four hundred and eighty acres of land, a country lot and a town lot, set sail for Mobile in the schooner McDonough. After a very

narrow escape from shipwreck upon Mobile Point, they reached the city; and having been hospitably received and aided in many ways, both there and by the landed gentlemen in the vicinity, they at last established themselves upon the spot selected, near the White Bluff on the Tombigbee. Erecting scattered cabins here and there amongst the thick forest of trees and of cane which covered the site of their estate, or in the prairie openings which dotted it, they cleared little patches of ground, and put in temporary crops for immediate provision, until some definite location and partition should be made. After a time the grant was surveyed and laid off into townships and sections; and a town was laid out and named Demopolis-The City of the People.

Complicated and grievous disasters, however, besieged them. High bred and delicate, unused either to any forms of business, or to the stern hand to hand struggle which alone wrests bread from savage nature, utterly ignorant of any manual art, and even of the most ordinary processes of agriculture, especially where so stubborn a forest was first to be conquered, and moreover, unacquainted either with the language, the laws or the customs of the people around them, it would have been difficult to select from the nations of the earth a company less fit for the rugged task they had undertaken.

Three distinct and successive times, by the incredi