The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 37, July 1933 - April, 1934 Page: 211

                                
Henry Austin

them  can pay me a dollar."74      The winter of 1838-1839 found
Austin still desperately in need of cash. In November he sacri-
ficed a choice league of land for six thousand dollars, of which
twenty-two hundred dollars was collected by the end of January.
Half of this amount went to support his children; the remainder
served to cancel a portion of his debts. He sold his furniture
and discharged his servants. A small additional income was
secured from his home at Bolivar, once more converted into a
"public house." However, these measures did not provide him
with enough money to escape the "mortification of suffering" the
sale of five hundred acres of his Flores Creek land to satisfy a
judgment of $187. After passing a "frightful winter," he went
to Houston in March, but found that no money, "not even treas-
ury shin plasters," was in circulation. The only available cur-
rency was in the hands of a "few shylocks," who used it to lend
at one per cent per day. He could obtain no offer for land near
Houston which had formerly sold for thirty dollars per acre.
His only resource, he wrote, was to sacrifice his "funded debt
at one quarter part the cost, to get money enough to pay
expenses here and back home again."'7
Although Austin supplemented his income with a meagre law
practice during the next two years,"7 his continuous need for
money led him to make another attempt to raise funds in New
York and the Mississippi Valley. But he found that "the Mexi-
can official declaration of another invasion of Texas, renders
Texas property and securities utterly unavailable." After brief
visits in Baltimore and New York, he made a return trip across
Ohio, and thence down the Mississippi to New Orleans, but he
"effected nothing," he wrote, by this "tedious and painful route."
He returned to Texas in the fall of 1839, believing that he would
have a better chance to find a market for his land there than in
the United States."
"4Holley to Brand, December 30, 1837; April 4, 1837, Holley Papers;
Telegraph and Temas Register, April 25, 1838; Austin to Holley, April 24,
1838, Henry Austin Papers.
"'Austin to Holley, November 21, 1838; April 8, 1839, Henry Austin
Papers.
7"Morning Star (Houston), April 16, 1839; Bryan to Lamar, May 25,
1839, in C. A. Gulick and Katherine Elliott (eds.), Lamar Papers, II, 589;
Brazos Courier (Brazoria), June 9, 1840.
"Austin to Holley, July 25, 1839; September 28, 1839, Henry Austin
Papers; Holley to Brand, July 26, 1839, Holley Papers.

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