eople 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 c