Journey through Texas, or, A saddle-trip on the southwestern frontier : with a statistical appendix Page: 77 of 552
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42 A JOURNEY THROUGH TEXAS.
was only on the last day or two that we made long stops for
wood. Twice we stopped at cotton plantations. On both, the
hands were at work picking. One, in Mississippi, where we had
time to visit the negro quarters, we found to be an outlying
plantation without a residence. There were a dozen or twenty
cheap white-washed board cottages, in a long straight row, with
out windows, raised three feet from the ground upon log stilts.
Each served for two families, having a common central chimney
and one entrance. At the door of some were bits of log as a
step, at many nothing at all. In the centre, the overseer's cot-
tage, larger than the rest, and planted in a garden. About the
others all was bare or dirty uninclosed space. In one of the
cottages was an old woman cooking the dinner of mush and
bacon. She directed us to the field, where we found all the
'women at work, picking. The men were getting wood from the
swamp. The picking went on with a rapid and sullen motion,
one gang carrying the cotton to the gin-house in huge baskets.
All wore tight Scotch bonnets. The cotton plants, seven feet
high, stood eighteen inches apart in rows six feet apart.
Near Fort Adams we noticed tomato and melon vines still
untouched by frost. And there we heard with reluctant ears
that yellow fever was lingering, and that the proprietor of an ad-
joining plantation had died the night before. The number of
victims in New Orleans had been terrible during the summer,
and though the city was now reported safe, it was not without a
sense of relief that we shivered in our berths through the night
before our arrival, and saw, at daylight, by the ice on our decks,
that the frost long prayed for had come with us, as we swept to
the centre of the thronged crescent that had been for days our
half-dreaded goal.
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Olmsted, Frederick Law. Journey through Texas, or, A saddle-trip on the southwestern frontier : with a statistical appendix, book, January 1, 1857; New York. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth2407/m1/77/: accessed April 26, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Special Collections.