Strange True Stories of Louisiana
Page 23
SALOME MUELLER,
THE WHITE SLAVE.
1818-45.
I.
SALOME AND HER KINDRED.
She may be living yet, in 1889. For when she came to Louisiana, in 1818,she was too young for the voyage to fix itself in her memory. She couldnot, to-day, be more than seventy-five.
In Alsace, France, on the frontier of the Department of Lower Rhine, abouttwenty English miles from Strasburg, there was in those days, as I supposethere still is, a village called Langensoultz. The region was one of hillsand valleys and of broad, flat meadows yearly overflowed by the Rhine. Itwas noted for its fertility; a land of wheat and wine, hop-fields,flax-fields, hay-stacks, and orchards.
It had been three hundred and seventy years under French rule, yet thepeople were still, in speech and traditions, German. Those were not thetimes to make them French. The land swept by Napoleon's wars, theirfiresides robbed of fathers and sons by the conscription, the awfulmortality of the Russian campaign, the emperor's waning star,Waterloo--these were not the things or conditions to give them comfort inFrench domination. There was a widespread longing among them to seekanother land where men and women and children were not doomed to feed theambition of European princes.
In the summer of 1817 there lay at the Dutch port of Helder--for the greatship-canal that now lets the largest vessels out from Amsterdam was notyet constructed--a big, foul, old Russian ship which a certain man hadbought purposing to crowd it full of emigrants to America.
These he had expected to find up the Rhine, and he was not disappointed.Hundreds responded from Alsace; some in Strasburg itself, and many fromthe surrounding villages, grain-fields, and vineyards. They presentlynumbered nine hundred, husbands, wives, and children. There was one familynamed Thomas, with a survivor of which I conversed in 1884. And there wasEva Kropp, _nee_ Hillsler, and her husband, with their daughter offifteen, named for her mother. Also Eva Kropp's sister Margaret and herhusband, whose name does not appear. And there were Koelhoffer and hiswife, and Frau Schultzheimer. There is no need to remember exactrelationships. All these except the Thomases were of Langensoultz.
As they passed through another village some three miles away they werejoined by a family of name not given, but the mother of which we shallknow by and by, under a second husband's name, as Madame Fleikener. Andthere too was one Wagner, two generations of whose descendants were tofurnish each a noted journalist to New Orleans. I knew the younger ofthese in my boyhood as a man of, say, fifty. And there was young FrankSchuber, a good, strong-hearted, merry fellow who two years after becamethe husband of the younger Eva Kropp; he hailed from Strasburg; I havetalked with his grandson. And lastly there were among the Langensoultzgroup two families named Mueller.
The young brothers Henry and Daniel Mueller were by birth Bavarians. Theyhad married, in the Hillsler family, two sisters of Eva and Margaret. Theyhad been known in the village as lockmaker Mueller and shoemaker Mueller.The wife of Daniel, the shoemaker, was Dorothea. Henry, the locksmith, andhis wife had two sons, the elder ten years of age and named for his uncleDaniel, the shoemaker. Daniel and Dorothea had four children. The eldestwas a little boy of eight years, the youngest was an infant, and betweenthese were two little daughters, Dorothea and Salome.
And so the villagers were all bound closely together, as villagers are aptto be. Eva Kropp's young daughter Eva was godmother to Salome. FrauKoelhoffer had lived on a farm about an hour's walk from the Muellers andhad not known them; but Frau Schultzheimer was a close friend, and hadbeen a schoolmate and neighbor of Salome's mother. The husband of her whowas afterward Madame Fleikener was a nephew of the Mueller brothers, FrankSchuber was her cousin, and so on.