Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 48, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 December 1893 — OF MANY NATIONALITIES. [ARTICLE]

OF MANY NATIONALITIES.

Inhabitants of the Storm, ravaged Re. gion of Louisiana. Of the 2,008 counted victims of the Louisiana coast floods only fifty-three were negroes, says a letter to the Troy Times. There are few colored people in the section visited by the storm. They are a mixed-up people in that part of Louisiana. The predominating races are Acadians, Austrians, Creoles, Islingues, Italians, Manillamen, Chinese, and Spaniards, the number of each ranging in the order named. The Acadians are descendants of the people who have been immortalized in Longfellow’s poem “Evangeline." These people have large families, frequently from twelve to fifteen children each. The Manillamen are full-blooded Tagais from the Phillippine islands; these peoEle had no women among them; they ad only one 'stove in the whole colony, and they eat their fish raw. They fraternize well with the Chinese, and are treated by the whites on equal terms. The people called Austrians are genuineSlavs, generally Morlachs from Dalmatia. They speak Italian, a relic of the days when Venice ruled Dalmatia. They are all fishermen, and are an industrious, bold and hardy people. The Islingues ire the descendants of a colony of Canary Islanders, who came over to Louisiana during the Spanish invasion. They have a dash of the Berber blood of the Canary aborigines and are darker than the average Spaniard. Scattered among these various people are a few Americana and Germans and many creoles. In spite of their propinquity,' these races generally live separate, and one can in traveling a few miles find settlements of pure-blooded people of each nationality. This is a remarkable fact, as many families are natives who can count their American descent back for ten or a dozen generations. They live in the swamps and lowlands, and this accounts for the terrible destruction of life by the storm. They control the entire fishing industry, but the packing houses for oysters and.shrimps are owned by Americans. There were 1,800 fishermen lost in the flood; the others were sailors, traders, storekeepers and farmers. The absence of negroes is due to the fact that they have been driven out by the overwhelmisg numbers of these queer prople.