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Chapter 8. Making a Living
- Texas A&M University Press
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chapter 8 Making a Living The first years in Texas were bound to be difficult for the Alabama Settlement, consumed as they were with the basic necessities— building houses and planting their first crops. The summer before the settlers arrived, the prairie between the Navidad and Karankawa rivers had burned, driving thousands of animals to relocate in the Lavaca and Navidad river bottoms. Even without the burn, the Lavaca River area of Texas had been known as a grazing ground for buffalo and wild longhorn cattle. Longhorns were so abundant that the area was ripe to become ranching country later on. The settlers had brought ample provisions and clothing from New Orleans, but they also learned to live on the wild deer and longhorns they hunted. Game was plentiful. Until their crops grew, the settlers depended on the hundreds of deer that wandered the prairies between the rivers. During the first year in their new homeland, they were able to plant only a few acres of river bottom land in corn, using an axe to clear the ground and a hoe to cultivate the soil.1 Even with this backbreaking labor, Francis Menefee White declared that he was able to grow enough corn for a year’s supply of bread. Illness posed a more serious problem. During the first summer everyone was sick with the “rounds” (diarrhea) and “fevers” (malaria and possibly dengue fever and typhoid), and ten to twelve people in the party died. Benjamin White’s daughter Lydia died within a few days of arriving. Martha Dever and Mary Davis (Elizabeth Dever’s daughter and granddaughter respectively) died of “fevers,” and Joseph Rector ( Jemima Heard’s son-in-law) was killed by lightning. The rest of the time was spent building houses and preparing and fencing fields. The houses followed the basic style common in the American frontier. A small family built a one-room cabin, but a larger family built two rooms, one for the parents and one for the children, with a “dog run” between them to catch the breezes. A separate cookhouse was built in the yard behind the house, and beyond the kitchen was an outhouse. The weather in Texas was harsh. After a cloudburst, the rivers have a terrifying propensity to rise rapidly and flood. Even as a young girl, whenever 74 chapter 8 I went out for a walk in the country, my parents would remind me, “Watch out for flash floods,” just as today one might tell a child, “Look before you cross the street.” The Lavaca and Navidad rivers are entirely fed by rains and therefore have some of the most destructive flooding in the state, roaring through a mile-wide floodplain, uprooting trees and cutting down banks.2 Some of the biggest rains in Texas history fell during 1832 and 1833. Sometimes it rained for whole months, and once it poured for forty-four hours straight.3 During these deluges the rivers were impassable, and houses were sometimes three to four feet deep in water, cut off from others in the middle of a huge swollen floodplain. Even without the flooding, this part of Texas— a mosquito-infested, searingly hot lowland—did not foster a particularly healthy climate. Surprisingly, after the first year in Texas, when everyone became sick with the rounds and the fevers, and the cholera epidemic of 1833, which spread as a result of so much flooding, the settlers enjoyed reasonably good health. They had been “seasoned,” as they put it, to the Texas climate. The newly tilled land was rich, and crops thrived, but if anyone ran short of corn, the settlers took the road from the Sutherland land to League’s Ferry on the Colorado River, where their relative Eli Mercer had settled. He gave them enough corn to make it through the next growing season. For a cash crop, the members of the Alabama Settlement planted cotton, which they knew well from cultivating it back in Alabama. Several cotton gins sprang up. Millican’s gin was the first to be built in the area, but several others soon followed. Once ginned and baled, the cotton was floated on rafts down the Navidad to the Mills brothers’ warehouse in Brazoria. The river was navigable from Matagorda Bay to George Sutherland’s land at the meeting of the Navidad River and Mustang Creek. It was also relatively easy to bring goods upriver to Sutherland’s place and then transport them by oxcart down the...