, and dearest friends. If to-day, across the lapse of years, the
question were asked what led me from the bondage of my discontent, it
would remain unanswered. Possibly it was the advantage of good birth;
surely the prayers of a mother had always followed me, and my feet
were finally led into the paths of industry. Since that day of
uncertainty, grandsons have sat upon my knee, clamoring for a story
about Indians, the war, or cattle trails. If I were to assign a motive
for thus leaving a tangible record of my life, it would be that my
posterity--not the present generation, absorbed in its greed of gain,
but a more distant and a saner one--should be enabled to glean a faint
idea of one of their forbears. A worthy and secondary motive is to
give an idea of the old West and to preserve from oblivion a rapidly
vanishing type of pioneers.

My personal appearance can be of little interest to coming
generations, but rather what I felt, saw, and accomplished. It was
always a matter of regret to me that I was such a poor shot with a
pistol. The only two exceptions worthy of mention were mere accidents.
In my boyhood's home, in Virginia, my father killed yearly a large
number of hogs for the household needs as well as for supplying our
slave families with bacon. The hogs usually ran in the woods, feeding
and thriving on the mast, but before killing time we always baited
them into the fields and finished their fattening with peas and corn.
It was customary to wait until the beginning of winter, or about the
second cold spell, to butcher, and at the time in question there were
about fifty large hogs to kill. It was a gala event with us boys, the
oldest of whom were allowed to shoot one or more with a rifle. The
hogs had been tolled into a small field for the killing, and towards
the close of the day a number of them, having been wounded and
requiring a second or third shot, became cross. These subsequent shots
were usually delivered from a six-shooter, and in order to have it at
hand in case of a miss I was intrusted with carrying the pistol. There
was one heavy-tusked five-year-old stag among the hogs that year who
refused to present his head for a target, and took refuge in a brier
thicket. He was left until the last, when we all sallied out to make
the final kill. There were two rifles, and had the chance come to my
father, I think he would have killed him easily; but the opportunity
came to a neighbor, who overshot, merely caus