The Log of a Cowboy A Narrative of the Old Trail Days

Excerpt

Just why my father moved, at the close of the civil war, from Georgia to Texas, is to this good hour a mystery to me.  While we did not exactly belong to the poor whites, we classed with them in poverty, being renters; but I am inclined to think my parents were intellectually superior to that common type of the South.  Both were foreign born, my mother being Scotch and my father a north of Ireland man,—­as I remember him, now, impulsive, hasty in action, and slow to confess a fault.  It was his impulsiveness that led him to volunteer and serve four years in the Confederate army,—­trying years to my mother, with a brood of seven children to feed, garb, and house.  The war brought me my initiation as a cowboy, of which I have now, after the long lapse of years, the greater portion of which were spent with cattle, a distinct recollection.  Sherman’s army, in its march to the sea, passed through our county, devastating that section for miles in its passing.