solved it, and at least set about spending as strenuously as they had gone about making. The spending was ridiculously easy. New Orleans, a Paris in miniature, lay within arm's-length, as it were. A winter there, ruffling it bravely, gaming with the best, and going the hottest pace of the time, ate up money in lumps. The Bowie brothers spent several such winters. In between they had summers full of politics, with much incidental diversion of brawls and fighting. Now we are coming to the knife. It is the direct outcome of one of these brawls. Bowie drank habitually, but rather in conformity to social requirements than because he cared for liquor. No man ever saw him the worse for a glass. He was rarely even flushed with wine. But few of the men about him had either such control of themselves or heads so capable of enduring a drinking-bout. When he had drunk them down they were apt to pick quarrels, maudlin or bitter, according to their temperament. memory of a contemptuous laugh. Bowie had perhaps laughed once too often, and came near to paying for it with his life. Three months of wrestling with fever, delirium, weakness as of a child, and he was up, riding hard, betting high, swearing great oaths, altogether himself again. But with a difference. He began to speculate in land, with fair success; farther, he was never unarmed. It was before the time of bull-dogs, swamp-angels, and the like hip-pocket friends. Either the horsepistol or the hair-trigger duelling-pistol was ill to carry about one's daily concerns. Bowie found a way out of that. For his hunting he had made a local blacksmith forge him a sharp, keen knife from what had been originally the blacksmith's own rasp. It had a two-edged blade, nine inches long, of a faintly curved outline, and thick enough at the back where it joined the handle to serve for sturdy hammering. For this he caused a neat spring-sheath to be made, attached it to a belt, and wore it constantly. He found it a friend in need, and trusty beyond words. More than once it saved his life in desperate affrays. The time was heady and turbulent; party feeling ran high; duels were plenty as blackberries. To the public mind they were a necessity. The man who would not fight "at the drop of a hat, and drop it himself," was soon made to feel that he had very much better not have been born. Usually Bowie let them pass. Most likely he thought the anger no more than a fume of the wine. Perhaps, too, he was diverted by it, in the same fashion that, as a lad, he had been diverted by the antics of the bears he trapped. The snare he had set then for Bruin was a hollow cypressknee filled with sharp iron spikes pointing in and downward, and baited at bottom with a luscious honeycomb. Eager There were progressive duels, too, from to reach the sweet, Master Bear thrust in which the popular mind no more revolthis head, seized it, and made to rush away ed than it does in this era from progreswith it, but found it impossible. His sive whist or euchre. It was one of head was in a wooden mask full of cruel them which gave Bowie and his knife to pricking points, and back as lustily as he fame. In some way there had come to might, the points went with him. Then be bad blood, black and bitter, between when he stood upright and tried to paw him and a certain Colonel Norris Wright. it away, he heard shrill boyish laughter, After long bickering, it was agreed to shriller cries, at last the ping of a bullet meet upon the levee opposite Natchez, or the swish of a knife-thrust; then he Mississippi, each with half a dozen friends, sank to rise no more. duly armed, and there shoot the matter out. There were a dozen on each side when it came to fighting. The battle was arranged to begin with threes, the rest standing by, and coming in only when those of the first fight were dead or disabled. But they had miscalculated their own self-control. After the first fire there was a general melée- the reserves to a man gripped pistols hard, drew knife-belts to a handy clutch, and went into the combat to do or die. Possibly some memory of this came to Bowie when, upon a fine summer day, he found himself unarmed, yet attacked, shot, and left for dead. It was in what was upon the surface a political quarrel. Bowie was not ambitious for himself, but had an inveterate habit of backing and defending friends of his own party. Most likely some tang of personal affront or grievance gave edge and acridness to the clash of opinions. There are human temperaments that mind a blow less than the Bowie, it appeared, was like to make an eighth. He was down, desperately wounded, weltering in his own spurting blood. His chief antagonist bent over him, possibly bent on succor, possibly also a coup de grâce. Bowie struggled to his elbow; there was a flash as of lightning, a hurtling thrust, the sound of a cracking breastbone, and Wright lay dead, with the original bowie-knife deep in his heart. The fight made a great hue-and-cry. The dead man had warm friends and powerful ones. Bowie was thought to be as good as dead, else their vengeance would have been sure and swift; but no swifter than public inclination to wear and own a bowie-knife. Local smiths worked day and night forging and shaping them; yet the slow mails which took to Philadelphia intelligence of the feud and its end, took also orders for two hundred weapons like that which had ended it. They were to be made in all fashions; some with inlaid hafts, some with silver and gold bedizenings upon hilt and scabbard. But the blade was the real thing. Upon its edge and temper life and more than life might come to depend. Bowie did not die. It took a long time to conquer in his fight with the grim adversary. Before he was in fighting trim adverse partisans had thought better of their hotly expressed determination to shoot him on sight. Even if they had not, it is likely nothing sanguinary would have come of it. There was that in his eye and countenance, especially when he was at short pistol-range or well within the limits of knife- thrust, which served as an antidote to gratuitous blood-thirst. Beyond question, it was this fight which eventually banished Bowie, but not through fear of resultant bodily harm. For all his rough life, his reckless courage, he had underneath a fine fibre of sensitiveness. It was touched in the quick, not by abuse of duelling and duellists, but by what he could not choose but read in the grave faces and shadowed eyes of the better sort of men. With the reckless rough- riding element he was more than ever a hero. The trend of that element was southwestward. Bowie went with it, not precipitately, but in languid, mannerly fashion. It was 1830 when it landed him in Texas, which, though still a Mexican state, was quick with revolt. Bowie's career there is a romance streaked and splotched with blood. Indeed, it could not help but be. The air, the time, the people, were all calculated to provoke it. Never was there a more picturesque commingling of human elements. Men of parts and breeding were there-planters from the Eastern seaboard or central South, with the culture of the schools, maybe even the polish of a grand tour abroad. Frenchmen of long descent, and the subtlest courtesy too, from the heart of Louisiana; a sprinkle of Spanish grandees; a remnant of mongrel Mexicans, Apaches, and Comanches, savagest of their tribes; Choctaws and Cherokees dissatisfied with new lands in the Indian Nation. More than and more powerful than all the rest were men of Bowie's type, alert, hardy, punctilious, shrewdly far-sighted, utterly unafraid. Texas deserved them, welcomed them, took them to her prairie heart, made them all free of her woods and streams and hills. In many of the hills gold was thought to lie. There was grass for the herds of an empire-grass that was cropped and trampled by countless legions of buffalo. Wild ponies ran there too, and cattle beyond number. They had nominal owners, but brands were not strictly kept nor sacredly respected. Wild fruit abounded, particularly wild grapes. Bees had begun to fill the forests with honey. It is a curious fact that the honey-gathering tribes kept only a little way ahead of settlement. The Indians said, pathetically, when they heard the buzzing and watched the creatures wing away, "There come the little white men.' Texas had room for all-red men, white men, little white men. For her twenty odd thousand souls she had a domain wherein twenty millions would not have been uncomfortably crowded. Seven-tenths of the twenty thousand had come to her from the United States. Not a few had left behind them histories they preferred to keep untold; but there were many more undistinguished, honest folk, or men whose records were wholly admirable. If the law's arm was short, life and property were still reasonably secure. They are apt to be in communities where pretty well every man knows the Ten Commandments by heart, and does not shrink from burning powder for their due and proper enforcement. Between the Natchez duel in 1827 and the time of his emigration Bowie had had several fights, and never come out second best. In Texas he set his hand to another sort of fighting. In 1831, with his brother Rezin, six other men, and a boy, he set out upon a trading and exploring expedition through the heart of the Comanche country. At six days' travel from possible succor he found his party assailed by five hundred mounted warriors, Comanches all, who rode like the wind, yet shot with deadly aim. Resist ance seemed hopeless in the face of odds so great. Bowie took the one desperate chance left him-and won the game. He divided his forces, stationing three in one skirt of woods, with the packanimals, and scattering the rest about a more considerable arborage. Each was fully armed-had rifle, knife, and pistols. Powder and lead were plenty; also wherewithal to eat and drink. Each grove had a spring in it. Close about the waters the white men lay or crouched, resolved, "if they must die, to take at least a hundred redskins with them." Five days the fight went on. Swooping in clouds, the red riders dashed round, round, ever nearing the devoted marksmen, and sending toward them in whirring flight arrows and bullets thicker than hail. But the wheeling ended in rout when it came within fair rifle-range. The men crouching in cover made every missile tell. Men and horses went down in struggling heaps at the sharp crack of their weapons. And they were so swift to load and fire that the chiefs easily persuaded themselves their enemy was hundred strong. But the attacking went on, until threescore braves were dead and as many more disabled, to say nothing of the ponies. Bowie had one man dead, whom he buried reverently; one desperately wounded, whom he took away to safety, although the attempt appeared to promise destruction to all the band. a The biggest Texan town was San Antonio de Bexar. It had been founded by the fathers in the palmy days of Spanish conquest, and was still the stronghold of Spanish influence, Spanish tradition, Spanish authority. It was capital of the province, and owned not a few houses fine after the old Spanish fashion. In one of the very finest there lived General Veremendi, Governor of Texas. He had one fair daughter, the very apple of his eye. They were pure Castilians, with all the hauteur of Spain; but not long after Bowie came into the city he had won and wedded the Governor's daughter. As to his life with her there is no record, save that it was brief. Within two years she bore him a child and died, taking the little one with her. Who knows but that the light of reunion to the best-beloved played lambently over the scarlet death at Alamo? When Texas declared for independence and called on her sons to fight for it, none was readier for the fray than Bowie. He was not self-seeking. In command with a colonel's commission, he resigned it and enlisted as a private, under Fannin, sooner than provoke dissension in the patriot army. But he could not keep out of the commanding to which he was born any more than he could keep out of fighting. When Alamo was fought, he was in equal authority with Travis. General orders were signed by both. Before that grim day he had fought the Grass Fight, a skirmish that would be amusing if its tragic sequel were lacking. Before the investiture of the Alamo the Mexican army lay in great force some miles away. It was rumored that a packtrain with pannier-loads of silver money was coming in to pay the men. Bowie and Travis thought such treasure might be put to better use upon the patriot side, so kept a sharp watch upon the hostile camp. Runners brought in word soon that there was a pack-train, a long one with bulging panniers, some little ways off the Mexican position. Bowie went out to capture it. He had only a handful of men, but these he bade to scatter in the high prairie grass in such wide order as to make their shooting convince the train guards that the whole Texan force was attacking them. In an hour they were so convinced, and ran away from their burros. The Texans took possession, and were fighting-mad at finding out that the panniers held only grass. Forage was needed for the Mexican cavalry, and the train had been sent out to supply it. So time, trotting hard withal, ushered in the days of Alamo. All the world has heard its story of investiture and leaguer of full three thousand men pitted against one hundred and fifty; of the days of desperate fight, more desperate hope; of expresses despatched in the face of what seemed death bearing appeals for help, that even at this late day stir the blood like a trumpet-call. It was the Bowie type which made Alamo possible. Strategically it is held to have been a mistake. As an example of heroism unalloyed, it is worth its cost in the bravest blood ever spilled. "Surrender, or the garrison will be put to the sword," said Santa Anna, in the name of Mexico. "Liberty or death!" answered Travis, speaking for all Texas. And so it came to pass upon that March morning the sixth day, in the year 1836 -that the fresh winds of Southern springtime fluttered the blood-red banner, the sign of no quarter; the Southern echoes caught and repeated the air "Degüello," which is, being interpreted, Cutthroat. All the Mexican bands played it as their soldiers sprang to the charge. That was at the earliest dawning. The sun was high ere they made breach in the wall and swarmed wildly through. Travis, mortally wounded, was fighting still; Crockett's clubbed rifle, lacking powder and ball, played as a flail-a deadly flail —upon the heads of his enemies. Bowie, from his sick-bed, kept up so desperate a fusillade he built a rampart of dead Mexicans across the door of the small chamber in which he lay. At last one Mexican more thrust a musket over the barricade of dead men and sent a bullet to Bowie's heart. Fitly has Texas inscribed upon the monument reared to these, her martyrs: Thermopyla had its messenger of defeat; the Alamo had none. Ruthless as they were, Bowie's enemies honored him. Tradition vouches that they buried him apart from the mass of dead, saying, “He was too great a man to sleep with common soldiers." He himself would hardly have cared for such sepulture. First and last, he was a man of his people-one with them in aims, in achievements, in passions, errors, and desires. A COLONIAL DAME. NEGLECTED RECORDS OF THE LIFE OF MISTRESS MARGARET BRENT, THE EARLIEST AMERICAN WOMAN TO DEMAND THE RIGHT OF SUFFRAGE. I BY CAROLINE SHERMAN BANSEMER. N this age of progress and restless activity, when we are prone to think that all we are doing now is a climax to what has gone before, it is surprising to find in the early records of colonial Maryland the prototype of what the nineteenth century calls the new woman. This woman, all unconscious of her unique position, is one Mistress Margaret Brent, kinswoman of Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore, the Proprietor of Maryland, and of his brother Leonard Calvert, the first governor of the colony. Leonard Calvert, as we know, and his little following of twenty gentlemen and three hundred laboring - men, landed on the island of St. Clements, and celebrated their first mass in the New World, March 25, 1634. When the news reached England of the goodly land they had come to, of the fertile plains and broad streams, of the forests abounding in game, of the vines loaded with grapes, other colonists were induced to follow in their wake. Four years later, on November 22, 1638, we find among the new arrivals in the province the names of two sisters-Mar VOL. XCVII.-No. 578.-29 garet and Mary Brent, who were cousins of the Calverts. We are tempted to speculate as to what their condition at home must have been to make so courageous and enterprising a step possible. We find they brought with them five men and four women. Being of the Lord Proprietor's family, they were given fine manors. They managed their estates with masculine ability, and as their affairs prospered, imported more settlers. They were allowed manorial rights, and the records tell us of a court-baron which was held at Mary Brent's home, St. Gabriel's Manor, near the ancient city of St. Marys, the capital of the province. With Mary Brent the records have little to do, and we are left to infer that she lived out her life of single blessedness undisturbed by "the world's ignoble strife." Not so with Margaret. In all our colonial history there is no figure which stands out more clearly than that of Mistress Margaret Brent, as with a strong hand she took her part in the affairs of her time. It is chiefly as friend and adviser of Leonard Calvert that she is conspicuous. Governor Calvert's lot seems to have fallen in troublesome times and hard places. In 1643 he found it necessary to return to England to confer with Lord Baltimore about the affairs of the province. On his return he found everything in a state of disorder. An insurrection was brewing, led by Claiborne, the Virginian, who was admirably aided by one Richard Ingle, who is branded as a pirate-a veritable Captain Kidd of Maryland. Kent Island easily fell into the hands of Claiborne. The western shore was next invaded, and the insurgents were every where successful. The town of St. Marys was taken, and the unhappy Governor was compelled to flee to Virginia for protection. For nearly two years the rebels maintained supreme power. The records of the province fell into their hands, and were mutilated or destroyed at their pleasure. Of attempts at government we find not a trace; it was a period of anarchy. Towards the end of 1646 Governor Calvert raised a small force of Virginians and fugitive Marylanders, and pledging his own and his brother's estates to pay them in good honest tobacco, entered St. Marys, and soon the whole province gladly acknowledged his authority. Peace was thus restored, but Leonard Calvert did not long enjoy the fruits of his efforts. On the 9th of June, 1647, this wise and just man died. About six hours before his death he sent for his kins woman Margaret Brent, and, in the presence of the witnesses gathered around his bedside, said, "Take all and pay all," by this brief direction showing his confidence in her ability above all others. He then appointed Thomas Green his successor as Governor of Maryland. Mistress Brent at once entered upon the discharge of her duties with truly Elizabethan vigor. On the strength of her appointment as Governor Calvert's executor she claimed the right of acting as the Lord Proprietor's attorney. This was allowed her by the Maryland Assembly. Now comes the most notable event of her career. When, on the 24th of June, the Assembly of 1647-8 was in session, doubtless occupied with discussing the affairs of the province, their rights as freemen, etc., they were startled by the appearance of Mistress Margaret Brent upon the scene, who demanded both voice and vote for herself in the Assembly by vir tue of her position as his lordship's attorney. Alas for Mistress Brent and her appreciation of the rights of her sex! The Governor promptly and ungallantly refused her. The injured lady, as her only means of retaliation, protested against all the acts of the session as invalid, unless her vote was received as well as the votes of the male members. By this action Margaret Brent undoubtedly placed herself on record as the first woman in America to make a stand for the rights of her sex. It is surprising to find how little this fact is known. In so comprehensive and authoritative a work as the history of woman's suffrage edited by Susan B. Anthony no mention is made of this extraordinary woman. In fact, it is there stated that a Revolutionary dame, Mrs. Abigail Smith Adams, wife of John Adams, of Massachusetts, was the first champion of woman's rights in America. In March, 1776, Mistress Adams wrote to her husband, then at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia: "I long to hear that you have declared for independency, but I desire that you should remember the ladies .... If particular care is not paid the ladies. . . we will not hold ourselves bound to obey laws in which we have no voice or representation." We are not told how John Adams replied to this epistle from his fair spouse, but we do know that in the famous Declaration of Independence, where all men are declared free and equal, the women received no more consideration than did Margaret Brent nearly one hundred and fifty years before. But events show that Mistress Brent was none the less a ruling spirit in the community. As we have already seen, when Leonard Calvert secured the services of the Maryland and Virginia soldiers in order to recover his province he pledged his own and Lord Baltimore's estates for their pay. He was unhappily prevented by death from fulfilling his pledge, and the soldiers, alarmed for their remuneration, seemed ready for mutiny. The weak and irresolute Governor Green was not equal to the emergency; but Margaret Brent, seeing the danger, came ably to the rescue. She calmed the soldiers, and paid them in full from Lord Baltimore's cattle. This action was clearly not to his lordship's taste, and brought down his bitter wrath upon her. But a splendid triumph was in store |