Pen Pictures, of Eventful Scenes and Struggles of Life

by B. F. Craig

Like drops of rain, descending upon the mountains, and hurrying down to form the great river, running them off to the ocean, and then returning in the clouds. The change is almost imperceptible.

New men come upon the stage of life as it were unobserved, and old ones pass away in like manner, and thus the great river of life flows on. Were the change sudden, and all at once, it would shock the philosophy of the human race. A few men live to witness the rise and fall of two generations. Long years have intervened and the characters portrayed in the preceding part of our story, have all passed away.

Some of their descendants come upon the stage to fight the great battle of life.

Young Simon will first claim our attention; he is the only son of S. S. Simon by a second wife, his mother is dead, and Young Simon is heir to a large estate.

The decade from eighteen hundred and forty to eighteen hundred and fifty, is, perhaps, the most interesting decade in the history of the settlement and progress of the Western States.

In that era, the great motive power of our modern civilization, the iron horse and the magnetic telegraph were put into successful operation, across the broad and beautiful Western States.

The history of the West and Southwest in the first half of the nineteenth century, is replete with romance, or with truth stranger than fiction. The sudden rise of a moneyed aristocracy in the West, furnishes a theme for the pen of a historian of no mean ability.

This American aristocracy, diverse from the aristocracy of the old world, who stimulated by family pride, preserved the history of a long line of ancestors, born to distinction, and holding the tenure of office by inheritance, could trace the heroic deeds of their fathers back to the dark ages, while some of our American aristocrats are unable to give a true history of their grandfather.

In the first half of the nineteenth century the cultivation of the cotton plant in the Southern States assumed gigantic proportions. The Northern States bartered their slaves for money, and the forest of the great Mississippi river fell by the ax of the colored man; salvation from the demons of want was preached by the nigger and the mule.

Young Simon was a cotton planter, inheriting from his father four plantations of one thousand acres, and more than six hundred slaves.