Between them and the inhabitants of the river counties there was little communication and less sympathy; and I fancy no country on earth of the same extent presented a wider difference in soil and population, especially one speaking the same language and professing the same religion.  Time, and the pushing a railroad through this eastern portion of the State, have effected vast changes for the better, and among these quaintly called piney-woods people 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 come to have something.