Chapter 25: Women in the Powder Room

Over the next three weeks, the warriors of the Tunica, the Atakapa, and the Chitimacha invaded the stronghold of New Orleans, always accompanied by one or two of Yellow Hair’s women with the rifles that didn’t make any noise. They’d kill one or two French soldiers with silent puffs of air and deadly lead balls to the head or throat. At first, it was a puzzling event to the French. Why would a soldier suddenly die from a pistol shot? No one heard any pistols.

Then, it turned into a deadly pattern. Then it turned into an attack by throats sliced open by the silent tribesmen. A few soldiers on the other side of the stockade fell to silent puffs of air. When the French commanders increased the guards looking over the palisades the newly appointed guards were all killed by rifleshots and then more soldiers were killed by the silent killers of the swamp men who slid into the fortress. It didn’t take much to hold your breath, swim under the piles of stakes hastily erected in the water. After a few tries, the Chitimacha especially had a knack for covertly cutting openings under the walls.

The soldiers inside were increasingly leery of taking the guard duty, after a few days of having all the guards shot down — the worst night was when the men assigned to watching the slave pens were silently shot down in the back, after the perimeter soldiers at the western walls were taken out. In the morning, there were forty dead soldiers found, but all the slaves were still behind bars.

The next night, the powder room, so ‘craftily’ hidden behind the wine and liquor casks under the officers’ quarters, was ‘unavailable’ to the soldiers who tried to enter the room. Or rather, they entered the room but never left. All twenty-five of Yellow Hair’s women had taken the room and they had enough lead and rifle air canisters to hold it.

After a large force of soldiers filled the hallway to the powder room – several hundred soldiers were crammed into the narrow hallways under the officers’ quarters – a large boom sounded and an overwhelming force of swamp warriors slipped first under the walls and then through the opened gates. The eight hundred Chitimacha, Atakapa, and Tunica warriors easily massacred the hundred and fifty French soldiers who were still on duty in the fort. Then they set about the job of taking down the four hundred pistoleers who were crowded into the hallways around the power room.

The women inside were hungry and relieved to hear and, eventually, see Yellow Hair and Broken Tooth striding into view. They had to pick their way around several piles of dead soldiers.

Inside the powder room, behind several casks that had been arranged carefully to act as barricades, with room between them for rifles, they found twenty-four hale and hearty riflewomen and one who had caught a ricochet from one of the French weapons. She tried to apologize to Yellow Hair for not holding up her part of the blockade, but he kept telling her, in Cromanche, that she had nothing to apologize for.

Her wound was not serious, but she had lost a lot of blood. Yellow Hair tended to her wound with the medicines that he had. He also examined the rifles and was happy to note that none of the women had any injuries from broken rifles or misfires. There were twenty-five rifles and they had more lead shot to handle another five hundred French soldiers, if it came to that.