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A LETTER WRITTEN TO ALFRED SMITH. FAYETTEVILLE.
LINCOLN CO.. TN. Submitted by Mrs. Wm. E.
Cooper (nee Suzanne Blassington), Dallas Burleson County, Texas
Feb. 25th 1853
Dear Friend,
I write a few lines to you, in compliance with my promise, but am sorry
that my letter cannot be interesting.--In the first place I must give you
an account of my own bad luck, and then I will give you a partial, but
faithful account of Texas, so far as I have seen it.
While traveling through Arkansas, my son Alexander took the cholera of
whicn he died on the 17th of November being sick with it about two days and
nights. Troubles seldom come singly. On the day that we buried him my wife
took the fever. We travelled a few days and she got worse, and I stopped
and got her in a house, where she died on the 6th day of December, of fever
and inflammation in the head. Thus have I had the hard lot from July to
December to follow my wife and my two oldest sons to their graves, one mur-
dered by a villain in Lincoln Co., and he turned loose to kill as many more
as he please, with a plenty of friends to swear him clear.--I travelled
through the northwest corner of Louisiana, and the first county I visited in
Texas was Panola, which with all the eastern part of Texas I found generally
of a light sandy soil, easily cultivated, and produces well, when they have
a seasonable year, but drought, they informed me, cuts the crops short. This
eastern part of Texas is a generally well timbered with pine and other timber,
tolerably well watered, range not so good for cattle as farther west where
the prairies set in, tolerable good for hogs. Subject to chill and fever.
Society just tolerable.
From the Trinity river to the Brazos river, the country is mostly prairie.
Good timber is very scarce, water is also scarce, the land on the rivers and
streams generally good, the prairie and post oak land generally poor, all sub-
ject to chill and fever. Settlements thin. The land on the Brazos bottom is,
I think, the most fertile land I have ever seen, with the exception of the Red
river bottom. Those two streams furnish the best cotton lands by far, and as
good corn land as I have ever seen in any country. The Brazos bottom is con-
sidered by most persons with whom I have talked on the subject, the best land
for cotton in the state. The land is as good as one ought to desire, but there
is no good water except cistern water, and very few in this county have yet
built cisterns. Of course the bottom is sickly, subject to chill and fever,
and other sickness. You can form an idea of the size of cotton stalks, when
I inform you that it is planted here in rows seven and half feet apart and the
stalks left in the drill a foot and a half to two feet apart, and the limbs
lock across rows that width and it grows so tall that bolls are frequently as
high as a man can reach when sitting on a horse. This I know to be a fact,
having rode among some of the cotton fields and reached up as high as I could
to reach the top bolls. But last year was an uncommonly good crop year here,
both for corn and cotton, it may not turn out so well again for several years.
They ask various prices here for land. For upland the price varies from one
to five dollars per acre. For bottom land in this county they ask from five
SEPT. 1975 132
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