The prospective journey was the same that we saw Suzanne and Françoise,
Joseph and Alix, take with toil and danger, yet with so much pleasure, in
1795. The early company went in a flatboat; these went in a round-bottom
boat. The journey of the latter was probably the shorter. Its adventures
have never been told, save one line. When several weeks afterwards the
boat returned, it brought word that Daniel Müller had one day dropped dead
on the deck and that his little son had fallen overboard and was drowned.
The little girls had presumably been taken on to their destination by
whoever had been showing the way; but that person's name and residence, if
any of those left in New Orleans had known them, were forgotten. Only the
wide and almost trackless region of Attakapas was remembered, and by
people to whom every day brought a struggle for their own existence.
Besides, the children's kindred were bound as redemptioners.
Those were days of rapid change in New Orleans. The redemptioners worked
their way out of bondage into liberty. At the end of a year or two those
who had been taken to plantations near by returned to the city. The town
was growing, but the upper part of the river front in faubourg Ste. Marie,
now in the heart of the city, was still lined with brick-yards, and
thitherward cheap houses and opportunities for market gardening drew the
emigrants. They did not colonize, however, but merged into the community
about them, and only now and then, casually, met one another. Young
Schuber was an exception; he throve as a butcher in the old French market,
and courted and married the young Eva Kropp. When the fellow-emigrants
occasionally met, their talk was often of poor shoemaker Müller and his
lost children.
No clear tidings of them came. Once the children of some Germans who had
driven cattle from Attakapas to sell them in the shambles at New Orleans
corroborated to Frank Schuber the death of the father; but where Salome
and Dorothea were they could not say, except that they were in Attakapas.
Frank and Eva were specially diligent inquirers after Eva's lost godchild;
as also was Henry Müller up in or near Woodville, Mississippi. He and his
boys were, in their small German way, prospering. He made such effort as
he could to find the lost children. One day in the winter of 1820-21 he
somehow heard that there were two orphan children named Miller--the
Müllers were commonly called Miller--in the town of Natchez, some
thirty-five miles away on the Mississippi. He bought a horse and wagon,
and, leaving his own children, set out to rescue those of his dead
brother. About midway on the road from Woodville to Natchez the
Homochitto Creek runs through a swamp which in winter overflows. In here
Müller lost his horse. But, nothing daunted, he pressed on, only to find
in Natchez the trail totally disappear.
Again, in the early spring of 1824, a man driving cattle from Attakapas to
Bayou Sara told him of two little girls named Müller living in Attakapas.
He was planning another and bolder journey in search of them, when he fell
ill; and at length, without telling his sons, if he knew, where to find
their lost cousins, he too died.
Years passed away. Once at least in nearly every year young Daniel
Miller--the "u" was dropped--of Woodville came down to New Orleans. At such
times he would seek out his relatives and his father's and uncle's old
friends and inquire for tidings of the lost children. But all in vain.
Frank and Eva Schuber too kept up the inquiry in his absence, but no
breath of tidings came. On the city's south side sprung up the new city of
Lafayette, now the Fourth District of New Orleans, and many of the
aforetime redemptioners moved thither. Its streets near the river became
almost a German quarter. Other German immigrants, hundreds and hundreds,
landed among them and in the earlier years many of these were
redemptioners. Among them one whose name will always be inseparable from
the history of New Orleans has a permanent place in this story.