CHAP. XXVI.] MOVERS TO TEXAS. 



slaves. One of them confessed to me, that he had been eaten 

 out of Alabama by his negroes. He had no idea where he was 

 going, but after settling his family at Houston, he said he should 

 look out for a square league of good land to be had cheap. 

 Another passenger had, a few weeks before, returned from Texas, 

 much disappointed, and was holding forth in disparagement of 

 the country for its want of wood and water, declaring that none 

 could thrive there, unless they carne from the prairies of Illinois, 

 and were inured to such privations. &quot; Cotton,&quot; he said, &quot; could 

 only be raised on a few narrow strips of alluvial land near the 

 rivers, and as these were not navigable by steamers, the crop, 

 when raised, could not be carried to a market.&quot; He also com 

 forted the mover with the assurance, &quot; that there were swarms 

 of buffalo flies to torment his horses, and sand flies to sting him 

 and his family.&quot; To this the undismayed emigrant replied, 

 &quot; that when he first settled in Alabama, before the long grass 

 and canes had been eaten down by his cattle, the insect pests 

 were as great as they could be in Texas.&quot; He was, I found, 

 one of those resolute pioneers of the wilderness, who, after build 

 ing a log-house, clearing the forest, and improving some hundred 

 acres of wild ground by years of labor, sells the farm, and mi 

 grates again to another part of the uncleared forest, repeating 

 this operation three or four times in the course of his life, and, 

 though constantly growing richer, never disposed to take his ease. 

 In pursuing this singular vocation, they who go southward from 

 Virginia to North and South Carolina, and thence to Georgia 

 and Alabama, follow, as if by instinct, the corresponding zones 

 of country. The inhabitants of the red soil of the granitic region 

 keep to their oak and hickory, the &quot;crackers&quot; of the tertiary pine- 

 barrens to their light-wood, and they of the newest geological 

 formations in the sea-islands to their fish and oysters. On reaching 

 Texas, they are all of them at fault, which will surprise no geologist 

 who has read Ferdinand R,oemer s account of the form which the 

 cretaceous strata assume in that country, consisting of a hard, 

 compact, siliceous limestone, which defies the decomposing action 

 of the atmosphere, and forms table-lands of bare rock, so entirely 

 unlike the marls, clay, and sands of the same age in Alabama. 



