Tales of the Sabine Borderlands

In 1830, eighteen-year-old Theodore Pavie traveled west on the Camino Real from Natchitoches, in the new state of Louisiana, to Nacogdoches, Texas, which remained under Mexican rule. After he returned to France, he wrote these four stories that are rich in the details of life he observed in the Louisiana-Texas border region."Le Negre" depicts the internal dynamics of a Louisiana slave community in an elemental tale of good versus evil. Pavie contrasts the nobility of the tragic hero, once a tribal chief in Africa, with the inhumanity of his white overseer."Le Lazo" is one of the first pieces of Texas or Western literature. It is an enigmatic blend of reportage and imagination reflecting the effects of the Fredonian Rebellion of 1827, the Spanish invasion of Mexico in 1829, and the passage of the Law of 6 April 1830.The fear inspired by Texas' unstable political situation in the 1820s drives the action of "The Bearskin", set in Lousiana's planter society."El Capuchin" tells of a full-blooded Spaniard and his Creole wife who flee increasing political hostilities in Mexican Texas. Once east of the Sabine, a lonely planter (probably a remnant of the pirate Lafitte's band) and his concubine take the couple in and alter their fate.After Pavie's death in 1896, his works slipped into quiet oblivion until Betje Klier discovered his travel journal and letters.These treasures of ethnographic fiction and historical detail should interest folklorists, historians, anthropologists, and anyone else curious about early life and literature in the region.