Tales from "Blackwood," Volume 5

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What took you to Texas?” is a question that has so frequently been asked me by friends in the States, that a reply to it is perhaps the most appropriate commencement I can make to a sketch of my adventures in that country. Many of my fellow-citizens have expressed their surprise—more flattering to me and my family than to Texas—that a son of Judge Morse of Maryland, instead of pitching his tent in his native State, should have deserted it for a land which certainly, at the time I first went to it, was in anything but good repute, and of whose population the Anglo-Saxon portion mainly consisted of outlaws and bad characters, expelled or fugitive from the Union. The facts of the case were these:—I went to Texas, endorsed, as I may say, by a company of our enlightened New York Yankees, whose speculative attention was just then particularly directed to that country. In other words, I had the good or ill luck, as you may choose to think it, to be the possessor of a Texas-Land-Scrip—that is to say, a certificate issued by the Galveston Bay and Texas Land Company, declaring and making known to all whom it might concern, that Mr Edward Morse had paid into the hands of the cashier of the said company the sum of one thousand dollars, in consideration of which, he, the said Edward Morse, was duly entitled and authorised to select, within the district and territory of the aforesaid Galveston Bay and Texas Land Company, a tract of land of the extent of ten thousand acres, neither more nor less, to take possession of and settle upon it, and, in a word, to exercise over it all the rights of a proprietor; under the sole condition that in the selection of his ten thousand acres he should not infringe on the property or rights of the holders of previously given certificates.
Ten thousand acres of the finest land in the world, and under a heaven compared to which our Maryland sky, bright as it is, appears dull and foggy! It was certainly a tempting bait; too tempting by far not to be caught at by many in those times of speculation; and accordingly, our free and enlightened citizens bought and sold their millions of Texan acres just as readily as they did their thousands of towns and villages in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan, and their tens of thousands of shares in banks and railways. It was a speculative fever, which has since, we may hope, been in some degree cured. At any rate, the remedies applied have been tolerably severe.