![]() And all that time the womenfolks and children of Salt Licks would be left in awild frontier settlement to make out the best they could. It would take months for the men to make the drive and ride back home. Abilene was better than six hundred miles north of the Texas bill country we lived in. Well, the idea sounded good, but some of the men still hesitated. "In fact," Papa wound up, "all we lack having a tight tail-bolt on the world is a little cash money. We bad wild game for the killing, fertile ground for growing bread corn, and the Indians had been put onto reservations with the return of U.S. As Papa pointed out the day the men talked over making the drive, we had plenty of grass, wood, and water. We lived then in a new country and a good one. This was to get "cash money," a thing that all Texans were short of in those years right after the Civil War. ![]() Anyhow, it was the year that Papa and a bunch of other Salt Licks settlers formed a "pool herd" of their little separate bunches of steers and trailed them to the new cattle market at Abilene, Kansas. He came in the late 1860's, the best I remember. One part meant that his short hair was a dingy yellow, a color that we called "yeller" in those days, The other meant that when he opened his head, the sound he let out came closer to being a yell than a bark. ![]()
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