COTTON AND SLAVERY.
CHAPTER I.
SOUTH-WESTERN LOUISIANA AND EASTERN TEXAS.
Nacogdoches.—In this town of 500 inhabitants, we found there was no flour. At San Augustine we had inquired in vain at all the stores for refined sugar. Not satisfied with some blankets that were shown us, we were politely recommended by the shopkeeper to try other stores. At each of the other stores we were told they had none: the only blankets in town we should find at ——’s, naming the one we had just quitted. The same thing occurred with several other articles.
Houston County.—This day’s ride and the next were through a very poor country, clay or sand soil, bearing short oaks and black-jack. We passed one small meadow, or prairie, covered with coarse grass. Deserted plantations appeared again in greater numbers than the occupied. One farm, near which we stopped, was worked by eight field hands. The crop had been fifty bales; small, owing to a dry season. The corn had been exceedingly poor. The hands, we noticed, came in from the fields after eight o’clock.
The deserted houses, B. said, were built before the date of Texan Independence. After Annexation the owners had moved on to better lands in the West. One house he pointed out as having been the residence of one of a band of pirates who occupied the country thirty or forty years ago. They had all been gradually killed.
During the day we met two men on horseback, one upon wheels, and passed one emigrant family. This was all the motion upon the principal road of the district.
The second day’s camp was a few miles beyond the town of Crockett, the shire-town of Houston County. Not being able to find corn for our horses, we returned to the village for it.
We obtained what we wanted for a day’s rest, which we proposed for Sunday, the following day, and loaded it into our emptied hampers. We then looked about the town for current provisions for ourselves. We were rejoiced to find a German baker, but damped by finding he had only molasses-cakes and candies for sale. There was no flour in the town, except the little of which he made his cakes. He was from Hamburgh, and though he found a tolerable sale, to emigrants principally, he was very tired of Crockett, and intended to move to San Antonio among his countrymen. He offered us coffee, and said he had had beer, but on Christmas-day a mass of people called on him; he had “treated” them all, and they had finished his supply.
We inquired at seven stores, and at the two inns for butter, flour, or wheat-bread, and fresh meat. There was none in town. One innkeeper offered us salt beef, the only meat, except pork, in town. At the stores we found crackers, worth in New York 6 cents a pound, sold here at 20 cents; poor raisins, 30 cents; Manilla rope, half-inch, 30 cents a pound. When butter was to be had it came in firkins from New York, although an excellent grazing country is near the town.