The population in the four river counties, at the time of which I write, was much more dense than of any other portion of the State: still there were numerous settlements in different parts of the State quite populous. That upon Pearl River, of these, perhaps, was most populous; but those eastern settlements were constituted of a different people: most of them were from the poorer districts of Georgia and the Carolinas. True to the instincts of the people from whom they were descended, they sought as nearly as possible just such a country as that from which they came, and were really refugees from a growing civilization consequent upon a denser population and its necessities. They were not agriculturists in a proper sense of the term; true, they cultivated in some degree the soil, but it was not the prime pursuit of these people, nor was the location sought for this purpose. They desired an open, poor, pine country, which forbade a numerous population.
Here they reared immense herds of cattle, which subsisted exclusively upon the coarse grass and reeds which grew abundantly among the tall, long-leafed pine, and along the small creeks and branches numerous in this section. Through these almost interminable pine-forests the deer were abundant, and the canebrakes full of bears. They combined the pursuits of hunting and stock-minding, and derived support and revenue almost exclusively from these. They were illiterate and careless of the comforts of a better reared, better educated, and more intelligent people. They were unable to employ for each family a teacher, and the population was too sparse to collect the children in a neighborhood school. These ran wild, half naked, unwashed and uncombed, hatless and bonnetless through the woods and grass, followed by packs of lean and hungry curs, hallooing and yelling in pursuit of rabbits and opossums, and were as wild as the Indians they had supplanted, and whose pine-bark camps were yet here and there to be seen, where temporarily stayed a few strolling, degraded families of Choctaws.
Some of these pioneers had been in the country many years, were surrounded with descendants, men and women, the growth of the country, rude, illiterate, and independent. Along the margins of the streams they found small strips of land of better quality than the pine-forests afforded. Here they grew sufficient corn for bread and a few of the coarser vegetables, and in blissful ignorance enjoyed life after the manner they loved. The country gave character to the people: both were wild and poor; both were sui generis in appearance and production, and both seeming to fall away from the richer soil and better people of the western portion of the State.
Between them and the inhabitants of the river counties there was little communication and less sympathy; and I fancy no country on earth of the same extent presented a wider difference in soil and population, especially one speaking the same language and professing the same religion. Time, and the pushing a railroad through this eastern portion of the State, have effected vast changes for the better, and among these quaintly called piney-woods people now are families of wealth and cultivation. But in the main they are yet rude and illiterate.
Not ten years since, I spent some time in Eastern Mississippi. I met at his home a gentleman I had made the acquaintance of in New Orleans. He is a man of great worth and fine intelligence: his grandfather had emigrated to the country in 1785 from Emanuel County, Georgia. His grandson says: "He carried with him a small one-horse cart pulled by an old gray mare, one feather bed, an oven, a frying-pan, two pewter dishes, six pewter plates, as many spoons, a rifle gun, and three deer-hounds. He worried through the Creek Nation, extending then from the Oconee River to the Tombigbee.
"After four months of arduous travel he found his way to Leaf River, and there built his cabin; and with my grandmother, and my father, who was born on the trip in the heart of the Creek Nation, commenced to make a fortune. He found on a small creek of beautiful water a little bay land, and made his little field for corn and pumpkins upon that spot: all around was poor, barren pine woods, but he said it was a good range for stock; but he had not an ox or cow on the face of the earth. The truth is, it looked like Emanuel County. The turpentine smell, the moan of the winds through the pine-trees, and nobody within fifty miles of him, was too captivating a concatenation to be resisted, and he rested here.
"About five years after he came, a man from Pearl River was driving some cattle by to Mobile, and gave my grandfather two cows to help him drive his cattle. It was over one hundred miles, and you would have supposed it a dear bargain; but it turned out well, for the old man in about six weeks got back with six other head of cattle. How or where, or from whom he got them is not one of the traditions of the family. From these he commenced to rear a stock which in time became large.
"My father and his brothers and sisters were getting large enough to help a little; but my grandfather has told me that my father was nine years old before he ever tasted a piece of bacon or pork. When my father was eighteen years of age he went with a drove of beef cattle to New Orleans. He first went to Baton Rouge, thence down the river. He soon sold out advantageously; for he came home with a young negro man and his wife, some money, and my mother, whom he had met and married on the route. Well, from those negroes, and eight head of cattle, all the family have come to have something.
"I was born nine months after that trip, and grew up, as father had done before me, on the banks of that little creek. I doubt if there ever was a book in my grandfather's house. I certainly never remember to have seen one there, and I was sixteen years old when he died. I think I was very nearly that old before I ever saw any woman but those of the family, and I know I was older than that before ever I wore shoes or pants. Nearly every year father went to Mobile, or Natchez, or New Orleans. The first time I ever knew my mother had a brother, I was driving up the cows, and a tall, good-looking man overtook me in the road and asked where my father lived. I remember I told him, 'At home.' He thought it was impudence, but it was ignorance. However, he was quite communicative and friendly.
"That night, after the family had gone to bed, I heard him tell mother her father was dead, and that he had disinherited her for running off and marrying father. I did not know what this meant; but the next day father came and told mother that her brother wanted to be kind to her, and had proposed to give him a thousand dollars out of the estate of her father, if he and she would take it and sign off. That was the word. I shall not forget, so long as I live, my mother's looks as she walked up to father and said: 'Don't you do it, John. John, I say, don't you do it.' Uncle had gone down to grandfather's, and when he came back, mother had his horse saddled at the fence. She met him at the door, and said: 'You don't come in here. There's your beast; mount him, and go. I am not such a fool as my John. I was raised in Louisiana, and I remember hearing my father say that all he hated in the laws was that a man could not do with his property, when he died, what he pleased. I haven't forgot that. I have not seen nor heard from any of you for fifteen years, and never should, if you hadn't come here to try to cheat me.'