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249
was married to Miss Lizzie Drake at Tilden, Texas, November 28th, 1883, and has seven children living. Mr. Young has had many thrilling experiences on the range and on the trail, about the most exciting of which occurred on the Colorado River. He says :
"I have swam every river from the Rio Grande to the Platte, and came near losing my life while crossing a herd on the Colorado in 1880. The river was on a rampage and about four hundred yards wide. When in midstream a drifting treetop brushed me off my horse and sent me to the bottom. When I came to the surface my horse had gotten away and there was nothing for me to do but rely on myself, and although I was badly hurt from the contact with the limbs of the tree, I struck, out for the shore. My old friend, Gus Claire of Beeville, had witnessed the accident and started to me on his horse, but I had drifted several hundred yards down stream before he reached me. As he passed by I caught the horse by the tail, when suddenly we got into a swift eddy, which carried us under a bluff, where we could not land, and so we had to drift down stream until the eddy changed, and then swim back to the opposite side of the river."
Mr. Young has occupied a prominent place in cattle affairs in West Texas for many years. He is still the same old John Young the boys of the trail knew in those bygone days. It is his ambition and lifelong dream to at no distant day erect a cattlemen's hotel in San Antonio, on the site of the old Southern Hotel, which for many years was the headquarters for all visiting cowmen. With D. J. Woodward and T. A. Coleman, he owns a mountain of the finest marble in the world near Alpine, and these three gentlemen are endeavoring to secure title to the entire Southern Hotel block, where they propose to build a ten-story marble hotel to be used exclusively by cowmen, and where the Old Trail Drivers' reunions