San Antonio was now the business point to which all the wagon-trains from Mexico converged. Hundreds of huge Chihuahua wagons were to be seen “parked” with military precision outside the city, waiting their turn to enter the grand plaza, deliver their packages of goods, and load with cotton for their outward trip. Everything was hurry, bustle, and confusion. The major-domo, urging his train of wagons through the streets, was loud and vociferous in his language, and each driver and outrider added copiously to the babel of tongues. Merchants of every clime were here, anxious to sell or exchange for cotton, or to procure transportation for their goods far into the interior of Louisiana and Arkansas.
Hearing there were men in town with a miscellaneous assortment of dry-goods, with a friend I went to the warehouse where they were stored to make some purchases. We were told “the goods were not even to be opened in San Antonio. They were imported especially for the Louisiana trade.” We implored the privilege of buying some much-needed articles, and at last moderated the request to “just one set of knitting-needles.” The Jew was polite, but inexorable; he protested “he did not own the goods—they were simply in his keeping; the owner lived in Shreveport; there were no knitting-needles in the stock that he knew of; and really the ladies could not be accommodated; he had not the power.” My disappointed friend exclaimed, “Well, Mrs.—-, we will have to give it up!” Quick as thought the man turned his searching eyes to my face. “Are you the lady who was in Piedras Negras last January?” I gave an assenting nod. “I was the sick man you made custard and soup for. You and your friend can have anything you want.” A box was quickly opened, and not only knitting-needles but handkerchiefs were selected. We took only what was absolutely required, for we expected to pay at least five dollars for a set of knitting-needles, and perhaps as much for each handkerchief. We thankfully helped ourselves, and, when we offered to pay, the grateful Jew declined, saying: “But for your kindness to a person you never knew or saw, I might have been buried in the sand at Piedras Negras; a few paltry needles and handkerchiefs are little to give in return for your goodness to me. Only,” he added, as with protestations and thanks we retired, “don’t tell anybody, for I can not open my goods here.”
All household and family goods were scarce during the war, even in Texas, that had Rio Grande facilities not enjoyed by the other Southern States, as the great bulk of the importations were specially adapted to army purposes. The difficulty of procuring stockings, handkerchiefs, articles of prime necessity, was very great; those for whom I helped to provide wore for two years home-made stockings, knit of heavy cotton yarn; and I recall cutting up my only silk dress—a brown India silk, with white dots—to supply the demand for handkerchiefs, making my husband a coat of a linen sheet, and helping a friend rip up a calico bed-comfort that she might make a dress of the material. Even planters, with large tracts of land and abundant supply of workmen, often suffered for the necessaries of life other than those they could raise on the plantation. Through Southern Texas, where our wanderings led us, railroads were few and the service poor. The “Houston and Beaumont” afforded a fair specimen of the entire system. Many plantations were situated twenty miles and more from any railroad or navigable stream, and often half that distance from a town or post-office. I spent weeks with a family that could not procure salt to put up their meat, and were reduced to the necessity of utilizing the dirt-floor of their smoke-house, which was rich in saline properties from the accumulation during a series of years of the waste salt and drippings. First leaching the earth (in the old-fashioned way of making lye from ashes), then, by evaporating the brine, sufficient salt was procured to cure a small amount of bacon. Neither lamp-oil nor candles could be purchased; candle-molds and the material to make them were extremely scarce, so that families were compelled to exercise their ingenuity in home production to meet the necessity. The dainty young ladies who played brilliant sonatas on jangling pianos, filled the house with melodious song, and read Racine and Molière in the original, spent hours over the boiling fat, striving with patient perseverance to make symmetrical tallow-dips, that for lack of adequate supply of candlesticks would probably shine from the necks of black glass bottles. The energetic mother, with broad, flattened stick carefully tested the soap during the process of manufacture, and succeeded in obtaining a fair saponaceous compound, which had often to be used in such a crude, immature state that it damaged the linens and faded the colored garments. On wash-stands in numberless houses little saucers of soft-soap were placed for toilet-use, salt being too precious for even a few grains to be spared to harden this domestic production.
Home-made looms were built in many back rooms, and housewives who had indistinct recollections of the industry, as practiced by their grandmothers, or a theoretical knowledge of the handicraft, labored to help black “mammy” recall the forgotten art of weaving cotton cloth for plantation use.
Many a young girl stepped back and forth to the whirring music of a big old spinning-wheel, while others with clumsy, clattering cards, costing fifty dollars the pair, laboriously prepared the fleecy cotton rolls.
A needle dropped or mislaid was searched after for hours; if one was broken, its irreparable loss was lamented. Needles, pins, hair-pins, and such insignificant articles, so common in every household that no reckoning is made of the number used and wasted, rapidly became very scarce, and occasionally vanished entirely, leaving an “aching void.” Tooth-brushes were replaced by twigs of shrubs, nicely peeled, and the ends chewed into brushes. Often one comb did duty for a whole family, the aid of a hair-brush being entirely dispensed with. Breakage of china or glassware was a household calamity, and, with the heedless, scatter-brain darkies who handled such valuables, one of painful frequency. Alas! it was so easy to wear out, lose, and destroy insignificant articles that could not be replaced! Garments were often patched and darned until the original material was so merged in repairs as to lose its identity. A member of the household, the winter we spent in Houston, was a valued friend of my father. Week by week I put his garments through such a series of metamorphoses that, when his wife arrived, in the spring, she could not tell his linen clothes from the cotton!
Wheat-flour was brought in limited quantities from Northern Texas, mostly for army use; very little was offered for sale, and then at such extravagant prices that hundreds of families were for months entirely deprived of its use, and, without having made the experiment, it is difficult to realize what an indispensable household article it is. “Corn-meal pound-cake” was one of our table luxuries; it is doubtful if even Marian Harland ever had a recipe that was so frequently copied and used: it required a peck of coarse, country-ground meal (the only kind to be had) passed through a wire sieve, a piece of tarlatan, and finally several thicknesses of muslin, to obtain a pound of corn-flour fine enough for the cake.
We stopped at many houses where there was no sweetening for coffee—and such coffee; or rather such substitutes! Peanuts, sweet-potatoes, rye, beans, peas, and corn-meal were used; the latter was the favorite at the taverns, all of them wretched imitations, though gulped down, when chilly and tired, for lack of anything better—a hot, sickening drink, entirely devoid of the stimulating, comforting effects of the genuine article.
Tea-drinkers fared no better: weak decoctions of sage or orange-leaves served for those dependent on the cheering cup, and could only be taken in moderation, as both are powerful sudorifics. Bitter willow-bark extracts and red-pepper tea were used as substitutes for quinine by the poor, shaking ague-patients who lived near miasmatic bayous and swamps.
Paper became so scarce that many newspapers suspended publication entirely, while others reduced the size of their issues to the minimum that would contain war and other topics of vital interest. When the supply of white paper was exhausted, various grades of brown wrapping-paper met the necessity, and as a final resort, in some instances, wall-paper, figured on one side, came into use. Reports of battles, with long lists of killed, wounded, and missing, indistinctly printed on the uneven surface of this coarse, colored paper, passed from hand to hand until worn out.