CHAPTER II

MY APPRENTICESHIP


During the winter of 1865-66 I corresponded with several of my old
comrades in Texas. Beyond a welcome which could not be questioned,
little encouragement was, with one exception, offered me among my old
friends. It was a period of uncertainty throughout the South, yet
a cheerful word reached me from an old soldier crony living some
distance west of Fort Worth on the Brazos River. I had great
confidence in my former comrade, and he held out a hope, assuring me
that if I would come, in case nothing else offered, we could take his
ox teams the next winter and bring in a cargo of buffalo robes. The
plains to the westward of Fort Griffin, he wrote, were swarming with
buffalo, and wages could be made in killing them for their hides. This
caught my fancy and I was impatient to start at once; but the healing
of my reopened wound was slow, and it was March before I started. My
brother gave me a good horse and saddle, twenty-five dollars in gold,
and I started through a country unknown to me personally. Southern
Missouri had been in sympathy with the Confederacy, and whatever I
needed while traveling through that section was mine for the asking.
I avoided the Indian Territory until I reached Fort Smith, where I
rested several days with an old comrade, who gave me instructions and
routed me across the reservation of the Choctaw Indians, and I reached
Paris, Texas, without mishap.

I remember the feeling that I experienced while being ferried across
Red River. That watercourse was the northern boundary of Texas, and
while crossing it I realized that I was leaving home and friends and