rred to him of
carrying a company of Choctaw ball players on a tour of the United States.
The tour was made, but the receipts barely covered expenses. Then in 1830,
Lincecum set himself up as a physician at Columbus. No sooner had he built
up a practice, however, than he became dissatisfied with allopathy and
went to study herb remedies among the Indians; and thereafter he practiced
botanic medicine. In 1834 he went as surgeon with an exploring party to
Texas and found that country so attractive that after some years further
at Columbus he spent the rest of his long life in Texas as a planter,
physician and student of natural history. He died there in 1873 at the age
of eighty years.[13]

[Footnote 13: F.L. Riley, ed., "The Autobiography of Gideon Lincecum," in
the Mississippi Historical Society _Publications_, VIII, 443-519.]

The descriptions and advice which prospectors in the west sent home are
exemplified in a letter of F.X. Martin, written in New Orleans in 1911,
to a friend in eastern North Carolina. The lands, he said, were the most
remunerative in the whole country; a planter near Natchez was earning $270
per hand each year. The Opelousas and Attakapas districts for sugar,
and the Red River bottoms for cotton, he thought, offered the best
opportunities because of the cheapness of their lands. As to the journey
from North Carolina, he advised that the start be made about the first of
September and the course be laid through Knoxville to Nashville. Traveling
thence through the Indian country, safety would be assured by a junction
with other migrants. Speed would be greater on horseback, but the route was
feasible for vehicles, and a traveler would find a tent and a keg of
water conducive to his comfort. The Indians, who were generally short of
provisions in spring and summer, would have supplies to spare in autumn;
and the prevailing dryness of that season would make the streams and swamps
in the path less formidable. An alternative route lay through Georgia;
but its saving of distance was offset by the greater expanse of Indian
territory to be crossed, the roughness of the road and the frequency of
rivers. The viewing of the delta country, he thought, would require three
or four months of inspection before a choice of location could safely be
made.[14]

[Footnote 14: _Plantation and Frontier_, II, 197-200.]

The procedure of planters embarking upon long distance migration may be
gathered from the letters whic