or pride. Perhaps I will see you here to-day at the hill. I will never have that pleasure uninvited. I need not tell you I feel much disappointed, my heart is heavy; but I have the appearance of movement.

As usual,

"Yr.,

"PHILIP NOLAN."

The marriage must have taken place late in 1799, for we have the following letter from Daniel Clark congratulating Nolan: "NEW ORLEANS, 1 Jan., 1800.

"I have heard with pleasure of the event which I hope will reclaim you from your wandering way of life and request you will accept of my sincere congratulations on the occasion. The trifles I had sent will not have arrived for the ceremony, but you may be persuaded that with every possible desire to execute your commission I could not succeed in time, owing to the delay of a lady, who, being a better judge than myself, procrastinated till I lost all patience. I expect to hear from you soon. In the meantime entreat you to present my respects and felicitations to Mrs. Nolan.'

"Is it true," he adds, "that you have lost a fourth part of your horses. I flatter myself that the report may be unfounded. Let me know your prospects of sale, and your plan, if you had time to form one.

66

And later he adds an admonition which may carry suspicion : .... attend to your business and think not of horse racing; you will lose time and money by it. I am fearful of your going into it, and, therefore, warn you against it.

"Yours affectionately,

"DANIEL CLARK."

From the ardent and impetuous bride there is but one letter; it is not addressed, dated "August, 1800, at Mr. Dunbar's." In it she writes like any ordinary happy wife to one of her family:

"Polly Minor is not going down with Billy, nor have I heard a word about Betsy's intending to be of the party. Billy is arrived and was here this morning, and informed me he would set off for B. R. (?) in early September. As to my going with him, it depends entirely upon whether Mr. Nolan can dispatch his business before that time. I am pretty confident that will not be the case. I, therefore, will not see you until you arrive at Natchez."

On the 22d of August, still at Forest Hill, the Dunbar plantation, is added the following continuation of family news:

"Mr. Nolan went to the swamp, where he keeps his horses, yesterday; he was not well; I am very fearful he has got the fever

again. We were obliged to sell Bob, and Mr. Nolan bought a negro man of the name of Joe. I am sorry to hear that you have got the fever again, the headache, I mean. All our family are well except Kitty Minor the younger, who still has the fever. Mr. Minor has given over going down this summer. my dear, remember your

Farewell,

"F. NOLAN."

In October following his marriage, Nolan set out on what proved to be his last expedition for horses. He may have intended it to furnish the topmost stone on the pinnacle of his fortune, and thus he may have represented it to his wife and her friends. She bade him goodbye with confident courage; such women are not apprehensive; and when the time elapsed for his return we can imagine her still confident and courageous looking for his return, still sure of him. But he never returned. She never heard of him or his party again, and after a weary, painful six months of waiting her child was born to a broken-hearted mother. For at the last, instead of the truth, the malignant suspicion whispered about, by her family and friends, cast its black shadow upon her. She, the proud and haughty Fannie Lintot, was a deserted, perhaps betrayed wife! And she who could have borne any other misfortune sank under the disgrace of her love. She died, leaving behind her the story of her tragedy and her infant son, who, it would seem, died also from the blight that fell upon him befre he was born. A moral and physical weakling, he was cared for by his mother's family until he was twenty-one, when he died of consumption and was buried beside his mother in Natchez, the last sad relic of two heroic souls.

The narrative, as related by Mrs. Minor to Mr. Hale, must have ended here. It was to account for the complete disappearance of Philip Nolan and the mysterious silence that enveloped his fate that Hale invented the fiction connecting him with the Burr conspiracy (an episode beginning several years later), or perhaps this may have been suggested as a family suspicion, an after infection of the great epidemic of suspicion, of disloyalty and treasonable connection with Burr, that raged throughout the South for many years afterwards with fatal effect to many a fair reputation in Louisiana and Mississippi.

The sequel of the story is told by the historians of Texas, and we know that the poor wife died for want of knowing what in her pride and love she would have given her life to know.

It is the same old story as old as the story of true love and broken hearts, and conveyed in the homely proverb about the pitcher that goes to the well, it passes on generation after generation.

Having engaged a larger company of men than usual and making his arrangements as carefully as of yore, notably in gaining friends among the Spanish authorities in Texas, Nolan had every reason to count upon his usual success, such a success as in 1798, for instance, when he brought back a fine cavalcade of 1,200 horses. He made greater preparations than ever before and started with a following of twenty men, taking for granted that as usual he could break through any snares and be superior to any mischance that he could not foresee. And, too, with all Americans he despised the Spaniards too much to credit them with the forceful sagacity in working out their own designs that they really possessed. Gayoso de Lemos, who had been transferred to New Orleans, succeeding, as he had aspired to do, Carondelet, as Governor of Louisiana, was dead. Stephen Minor had replaced him for a time as commandant of the Natchez district, but had resigned from a Spanish official position to follow his State into the Union and had become again an American citizen. Don José Maria Vidal succeeded him as commandant, and eventually became Consul in the Natchez district. He presumably was a friend of Nolan's and knew, and could not help knowing, the truth about his plans; that now, at least, they were purely money-making. Nevertheless, actuated by a personal spite or public zeal, when the expedition was about starting he entered a complaint against Nolan before Governor Sargent, the American Governor of Mississippi, and Judge Bruin, the judge of the Superior Court, asking that he and his expedition be arrested and detained. Nolan, brought before these high authorities, exhibited his passports and papers and was allowed to proceed. Vidal, however, not to be balked in his design, sent an express to the Spanish Commandant at Washita to stop Nolan. That snare, as we shall see, was easily avoided; not so the other one set by Salcedo, the new Governor of Louisiana, vice Casacalvo, who had ad interim replaced Gayoso.

One of the first measures of Salcedo's administration, as he informs his government, was directed to check what he thought the dangerous designs of the Americans, who as neighbors he considered very unsafe. He, therefore, reported that he had sent up to Natchitoches all that was necessary to arm and equip the militia of that district, with the view of counteracting the projects of the American bandit, Philip Nolan, who had introduced himself into the interior provinces of New Spain with thirty-six armed men.

In the meantime Nolan started on his expedition. The account of it is preserved in the narrative of one of his company, Ellis Bean, who, when a boy of seventeen lived in Natchez, whom Nolan engaged to go with him.

They crossed the Mississippi at Walnut Hills and took a western course for the Washita. About forty miles from the river they met fifty Spaniards sent by the Commandant at Washita to stop them. Though the Americans counted only twenty-one men, the Spaniards were afraid to attack them. Avoiding Washita, the troops passed on, crossing the Washita River and heading for Red River, at the old Caddo town. In six days they reached the Trinity River, and crossing it found big open prairies through which they advanced. For nine days the company was compelled to subsist on the flesh of mustang horses, when they reached the Brazos, where they found wild horses by thousands. Here they built an enclosure and penned about three hundred head, and here they were visited by a party of two hundred Comanche Indians, with their women and children, who invited the Americans to the South Fork of Red River to see their chief. The Americans went and stayed there a month, making friends with four or five tribes who were at peace with the Comanches. They then returned to the camp where they had left their horses, their Indian friends accompanying them and staying with them a few days, when they left to go on a buffalo hunt. But it was found after they left that they had stolen eleven horses. As they were the trained horses used for capturing the wild ones, and the Americans could not get along without them, they determined to pursue the thieves, although this had to be done on foot. Nolan, with Bean and four men and a negro boy named Cæsar, volunteered for this service. In nine days they came upon the Indians in camp, but found there but a few

men with their women and children; the rest of them had gone hunting. Four horses were discovered and taken; the rest were brought in by the hunting party in the evening. The Americans securing them, returned with them to their camp. They were resting and preparing for the capture of more horses when one morning before dawn they were surrounded by a troop of Spaniards sent by the Spanish Governor from Chihuahua, and, guided by Indians. Without speaking a word they commenced firing and after about ten minutes "our gallant leader, Nolan," was slain by a musket ball which hit him in the head. This was on March 22d, 1801.

After a spirited and skillful fight of the force of twelve against one hundred and fifty Spaniards armed with a swivel gun, which they had brought upon the back of a mule; the Americans beginning to lose their men, responded for a parley, and an agreement was made that both parties, ceasing the fight, should return to Nacogdoches together; the Americans stipulating, however, that they would not surrender as prisoners, but would retain their arms. And so they set out on the march as comrades; the Americans first, however, burying their gallant leader. In a few days they reached Nacogdoches, where the Americans were detained a month waiting for an order from the Governor of Texas at Chihuahua to return to their country. But instead of this order they were put in irons and marched off to San Antonio, where they were kept in prison sixteen months; in short, the Spaniards, keeping to their record established in America for faithlessness and cruelty to their enemies, inflicted upon Bean and his companions for the next ten years the extremist cruelty in the way of imprisonment, starvation and chains. Many of them died, but Bean, by virtue of his youthful strength and courage, was able to match cruelty with endurance and overmatch it with his wit, and thus by a series of the most extraordinary adventures in the way of escapes and recaptures that were ever related reached New Orleans in 1814, and finding the British on the point of attack, volunteered in the American army, joining Captain Maunsell White's company, which was stationed at Bayou St. John.

When the British landed, his company, as we know, was marched to the front, and Jackson, who, Bean says he had known from childhood, stationed him at a 24-pounder in the breast