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 could
not, to-day, be more than seventy-five.
In Alsace, France, on the frontier of the Department of Lower Rhine, about
twenty English miles from Strasburg, there was in those days, as I suppose
there still is, a village called Langensoultz. The region was one of hills
and valleys and of broad, flat meadows yearly overflowed by the Rhine. It
was 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 the
people were still, in speech and traditions, German. Those were not the
times to make them French. The land swept by Napoleon's wars, their
firesides robbed of fathers and sons by the conscription, the awful
mortality of the Russian campaign, the emperor's waning star,
Waterloo--these were not the things or conditions to give them comfort in
French domination. There was a widespread longing among them to seek
another land where men and women and children were not doomed to feed the
ambition of European princes.
In the summer of 1817 there lay at the Dutch port of Helder--for the great
ship-canal that now lets the largest vessels out from Amsterdam was not
yet constructed--a big, foul, old Russian ship which a certain man had
bought 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 from
the surrounding villages, grain-fields, and vineyards. They presently
numbered nine hundred, husbands, wives, and children. There was one family
named Thomas, with a survivor of which I conversed in 1884. And there was
Eva Kropp, _née_ Hillsler, and her husband, with their daughter of
fifteen, named for her mother. Also Eva Kropp's sister Margaret and her
husband, whose name does not appear. And there were Koelhoffer and his
wife, and Frau Schultzheimer. There is no need to remember exact
relationships. All these except the Thomases were of Langensoultz.
As they passed through another village some three miles away they were
joined by a family of name not given, but the mother of which we shall
know by and by, under a second husband's name, as Madame Fleikener. And
there too was one Wagner, two generations of whose descendants were to
furnish each a noted journalist to New Orleans. I knew the younger of
these in my boyhood as a man of, say, fifty. And there was young Frank
Schuber, a good, strong-hearted, merry fellow who two years after became
the husband of the younger Eva Kropp; he hailed from Strasburg; I have
talked with his grandson. And lastly there were among the Langensoultz
group two families named Müller.
The young brothers Henry and Daniel Müller were by birth Bavarians. They
had married, in the Hillsler family, two sisters of Eva and Margaret. They
had been known in the village as lockmaker Müller and shoemaker Müller.
The wife of Daniel, the shoemaker, was Dorothea. Henry, the locksmith, and
his wife had two sons, the elder ten years of age and named for his uncle
Daniel, the shoemaker. Daniel and Dorothea had four children. The eldest
was a little boy of eight years, the youngest was an infant, and between
these were two little daughters, Dorothea and Salome.
And so the villagers were all bound closely together, as villagers are apt
to be. Eva Kropp's young daughter Eva was godmother to Salome. Frau
Koelhoffer had lived on a farm about an hour's walk from the Müllers and
had not known them; but Frau Schultzheimer was a close friend, and had
been a schoolmate and neighbor of Salome's mother. The husband of her who
was afterward Madame Fleikener was a nephew of the Müller brothers, Frank
Schuber was her cousin, and so on.