The Port Gibson Correspondent

ROARING JACK RUSSELL.

Everybody in these "diggins" has heard of Jack Russell, for many years a popular steamboat captain, well known in his younger days as a 'Mississippi screamer.' He is now a candidate for the Kentucky Senate, and the Frankfort Commonwealth is publishing his biography. The following is an extract:

"It was the custom in those days for the young and enterprising laboring men of Kentucky to make at least one trip to New Orleans, and Russell was not of a temperament to suffer himself to be behind any of his companions in acts of that sort. In the first of those visits, he, like every one of his age, had a natural curiosity to visit places of amusement and to see the manners and customs of a strange land. New Orleans was at that time the rendezvous of the pirates of the Gulf, and these freebooters bore themselves with a high hand, and were under the control of a leader whose name was a terror in all the western seas. Chance led Russell and a steamboat captain named Holton, to a place where dancing was the order of entertainment, and any one could join in the amusement when he thought proper to do so. Russell selected a partner and flung himself into the dance with all the ardor of a young Kentuckian, and, as we say in the West, was going it with his whole soul, when he felt himself slightly tripped by some of the bystanders. He instantly discerned the quarter from which it came, fixed his eye upon him, took the measure of his man and determined, if the insult was repeated on the next round, to deal with him—as he deserved.

His assailant was a dark, thick set looking man, bedizzened as ruffian dandies generally are, with a large diamond breastpin, with glittering finger rings and a profusion of gold chains about his person, and fortified all over with pistols and dirks. In a few moments the change of position brought him again near his unknown adversary, and the same indignity was offered, when Russell, without any sort of parley, knocked him down, dragged him to the door of the house and kicked him out. In an instant the cry was raised of "bar the doors—bar the doors, for LA FITTE will be back again in a moment with all his devils at his back and they will murder us all.' And sure enough, Lafitte soon returned with a gang of pirates to work vengeance on the youth that had so mastered him, whose very name had awed all other men. He endeavored to break down the doors, and failing in this he ordered his men to fire in at the windows and through every crack through which they could force a gun, and volley upon volley of musketry was poured into the house.

Capt. Holton, who had been in the hottest of the battles at Raisin, and had been severely wounded in one of them, declares to this day that he felt in more imminent danger of his life from this fire of Lafitte's men than he did from that of the British and Indians.

The city police was attracted to the place by the incessant report of the guns, was repulsed by Lafitte and returned to the city for a detachment of regulars who relieved the besieged by charging the buccaneers with fixed bayonets."