Athens. Then they set out again for Tennessee; but on the road in
South Carolina the wreck of the wagon and its ancient occupant gave
abundant excuse for the purchase of a farm there. After another crop,
successful as usual, the family moved back to Georgia and cropped still
another farm. Young Gideon now attended school until his father moved
again, this time southward, for a crop near Eatonton. Gideon then left his
father after a quarrel and spent several years as a clerk in stores here
and there, as a county tax collector and as a farmer, and began to read
medicine in odd moments. He now married, about the beginning of the year
1815, and rejoined his father who was about to cross the Indian country to
settle in Alabama. But they had barely begun this journey when the father,
while tipsy, bought a farm on the Georgia frontier, where the two families
settled and Gideon interspersed deer hunting with his medical reading. Next
spring the cavalcade crossed the five hundred miles of wilderness in six
weeks, and reached the log cabin village of Tuscaloosa, where Gideon built
a house. But provisions were excessively dear, and his hospitality to other
land seekers from Georgia soon consumed his savings. He began whipsawing
lumber, but after disablement from a gunpowder explosion he found lighter
employment in keeping a billiard room. He then set out westward again,
breaking a road for his wagon as he went. Upon reaching the Tombigbee River
he built a clapboard house in five days, cleared land from its canebrake,
planted corn with a sharpened stick, and in spite of ravages from bears and
raccoons gathered a hundred and fifty bushels from six acres. When the town
of Columbus, Mississippi, was founded nearby in 1819 he sawed boards to
build a house on speculation. From this he was diverted to the Indian
trade, bartering whiskey, cloth and miscellaneous goods for peltries. He
then became a justice of the peace and school commissioner at Columbus,
surveyed and sold town lots on public account, and built two school houses
with the proceeds. He then moved up the river to engage anew in the Indian
trade with a partner who soon proved a drunkard. He and his wife there
took a fever which after baffling the physicians was cured by his own
prescription. He then moved to Cotton Gin Port to take charge of a store,
but was invalided for three years by a sunstroke. Gradually recovering,
he lived in the woods on light diet until the thought occu