My recovery was due to youth and a splendid constitution.  Within six weeks I was invalided home, and inside a few months I was assigned to the commissary department with the army in Virginia.  It was while in the latter service that I made the acquaintance of many Texans, from whom I learned a great deal about the resources of their State,—­its immense herds of cattle, the cheapness of its lands, and its perpetual summer.  During the last year of the war, on account of their ability to handle cattle, a number of Texans were detailed to care for the army’s beef supply.  From these men I received much information and a pressing invitation to accompany them home, and after the parole at Appomattox I took their address, promising to join them in the near future.  On my return to the old homestead I found the place desolate, with burnt barns and fields laid waste.  The Shenandoah Valley had experienced war in its dread reality, for on every hand were the charred remains of once splendid homes.  I had little hope that the country would ever recover, but my father, stout-hearted as ever, had already begun anew, and after helping him that summer and fall I again drifted west to my brother’s farm.

The war had developed a restless, vagabond spirit in me.  I had little heart to work, was unsettled as to my future, and, to add to my other troubles, after reaching Missouri one of my wounds reopened.  In the mean time my brother had married, and had a fine farm opened up.  He offered me every encouragement and assistance to settle down to the life of a farmer; but I was impatient, worthless, undergoing a formative period of early manhood, even spurning the advice of father, mother, 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