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Editor’s Note: This year marks the Bicentennial, 2024-2025, of Lafayette and his farewell tour, “Guest of the Nation”, which took place August 15, 1824-September 7, 1825. To commemorate the occasion, the LaGrange Daily News will be publishing a series of columns by Richard Ingram, a longtime resident of LaGrange and Chair of Friends of Lafayette.

Week of April 21, 1825

The Farewell Tour

Ten days Lafayette was aboard the “SS Natchez,” steaming up the Mississippi River to St. Louis.  Levasseur, Lafayette’s secretary, commented in “Lafayette in America in 1824 and 1825,” translated by Alan Hoffman, that land along the Mississippi was “rather high priced” at fifty to sixty dollars an acre and less expensive “as one goes farther away from the means of transport.”  Swarms of mosquitoes, he said, “hurl themselves in thick clumps on travelers,” making mosquito nets an imperative at night.  There were no settlements worthy of the name between Natchez and St. Louis, only cabins where people from north and east “abandon the good for hope of the better.”  Sawyers were frequent, large tree trunks toppled into the river by the force of its current, and whose points could pierce the hull of a ship and sink it.  Travelers could be seen along the banks waiting for their damaged steamers to be repaired.  A sawyer tended to bob up-and-down with the current such that half the time it was submerged, concealed from view; a pierced hull allowed water free entry and often, sometimes within minutes, the ship sank.  The “Natchez” made periodic stops for wood to fuel its furnace.  At one such stop the woodcutters told Levasseur about a steamer which exploded, killing forty passengers.  This bit of information could not have been consoling.  These woodcutters lived on the banks of the Mississippi and made a living supplying steamboats with wood, like filling stations.  Sometimes no woodcutter would be tending the wood cords; the captain would load what he needed and nailed to a tree the name of his ship, the date, his address, and his signature, like a promissory note.  The woodcutter would present for payment at Natchez or New Orleans sometimes months later.  The sense of fair play was stunning.

One week and four hundred and fifty miles from Natchez, having steamed past Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri on the left, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky on the right, the “Natchez” was at the mouth of the Ohio River.  Captain Davis was unfamiliar with the Mississippi north of this confluence; he steamed up the Ohio four miles to pick up a more knowledgeable pilot.  Waiting for them was not only the pilot but the steamboat “Mechanic,” with the Tennessee Arrangement Committee ready to take Lafayette on board and escort him up the Cumberland River to Nashville where, they said, he was overdue.  They had not been notified of the St. Louis visit.  The Tennessee delegation was insistent.  Wrangling concluded, it was decided that Lafayette would continue to St. Louis aboard the “Natchez” and half the Tennessee delegation would accompany him; the other half would remain aboard the “Mechanic,” anchored at the mouth of the Ohio ready to transfer on his return from St. Louis.

Levasseur spotted a flock of Louisiana geese, captured five of them.  These geese, along with wild turkeys, Devonshire cows, and American partridges would populate Lafayette’s farm at LaGrange.

Late on the 28th the “Natchez” arrived at a hamlet of sixty homes called Carondolet, founded by French settlers, southeast of St. Louis six or seven miles.  These lands had been cultivated by them for ten or twenty years; they assumed ownership, but they had not registered with the United States government.  They were at risk of losing the land and asked Lafayette to intercede.  He promised to bring this to the attention of the authorities back in Washington.  Residents gifted him with more geese, a doe, and shells from the riverbed, tokens of their appreciation.

It was late.  They spent the night anchored offshore.  St. Louis tomorrow, and the single occasion when Lafayette was snubbed.