CHAPTER I.
A SCAMPER IN THE PRAIRIE.
“
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.
I had not escaped the contagion, and, having got the land on paper, I thought I should like to see it in dirty acres. My intention was to select my plot of ground and take possession of it, and then, if I did not like the country, to turn it into dollars again. If, upon the other hand, the country pleased me, I would return to Maryland, get together what was needful for the undertaking, and set up my roof-tree in Texas for good and all. Accordingly, in company with a friend who had a similar venture, I embarked at Baltimore on board the Catcher schooner, and, after a three weeks’ voyage, arrived in Galveston Bay.
The grassy shores of this bay, into which the river Brazos empties itself, rise so little above the surface of the water, which they strongly resemble in colour, that it would be difficult to discover them, were it not for three stunted trees growing on the western extremity of a long lizard-shaped island that stretches nearly sixty miles across the bay, and conceals the mouth of the river. These trees are the only landmark for the mariner; and, with their exception, not a single object—not a hill, a house, nor so much as a bush, relieves the level sameness of the island and adjacent continent.
After we had, with some difficulty, got on the inner side of the island, a pilot came on board and took charge of the vessel. The first thing he did was to run us on a sandbank, off which we got with no small labour, and by the united exertions of sailors and passengers, and at length entered the river. In our impatience to land, I and my friend left the schooner in a cockleshell of a boat, which upset in the surge, and we found ourselves floundering in the water. Luckily it was not very deep, and we escaped with a thorough drenching.
When we had scrambled on shore, we gazed about us for some time before we could persuade ourselves that we were actually upon land, so unnatural was its aspect. It was, without exception, the strangest coast we had ever seen, and there was scarcely a possibility of distinguishing the boundary between earth and water. The green grass grew down to the edge of the green sea, and there was only the streak of white foam left by the latter upon the former to serve as a line of demarcation. Before us was a perfectly level plain, a hundred or more miles in extent, covered with long fine grass, rolling in waves before each puff of the sea-breeze, with neither tree, nor house, nor hill, to vary the unbroken monotony of the surface. Ten or twelve miles towards the north and north-west, we distinguished some dark masses, which we afterwards discovered to be groups of trees; but to our eyes they looked exactly like islands in a green sea, and we subsequently learned that such groups, innumerable in Texan prairies, are called islands by the people of the country. A more appropriate name, or one better describing their appearance, could not be given to them.
Proceeding along the shore, we came to a blockhouse situated behind a small tongue of land projecting into the river, and decorated with the flag of the Mexican republic, waving in all its glory from the roof. This building, the only one of which, at that time, Galveston harbour could boast, served, as may be supposed, for a great variety of uses. It was the custom-house and the barracks for the garrison (consisting of a company of Mexican infantry), the residence of the controller of customs, and of the civil and military intendant, the headquarters of the officer commanding, and it served, moreover, as hotel, and wine and spirit store. Alongside the board, on which was depicted a sort of hieroglyphic, intended for the Mexican eagle, hung a rum-bottle doing duty as a sign, and the republican banner threw its protecting shadow over an announcement of—“Brandy, Whisky, and accommodation for Man and Beast.”