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414
old. My father stopped in Parker County for a short time, then bought a tract of land in Jack County, nine miles north of Jacksboro, on Hall's Creek, and opened up a fine farm there. At that time we were on the extreme frontier, and the country was infested with hostile Indians, who made raids almost every full moon, and we had to keep our horses locked with trace chains to trees in the yard to keep the redskins from stealing them. In July, 1860, my father was waylaid and killed by the Indians, while he was out deer hunting in a little ravine near home. This tragedy happened just at sundown, and ' was so near home I heard his gun fire, and we all thought he was shooting a deer. But when he failed to return we became uneasy and gave the alarm, and next morning the neighbors found his body. He had been shot eighteen times with arrows, scalped, and his clothing taken. His gun had been broken off at the breech, evidently in the hand-to-hand struggle that took place when the Indians closed in upon him.
Some time previous to the killing of my father, the Indians had murdered a man named Cooley, our nearest neighbor, three miles away. Also in the same year one of the Browning boys over on the West Fork was killed and his brother shot through the breast with an arrow. Before that the Loss Valley murder took place, in which several women and children were killed, one of the women, Mrs. Cameron, being scalped and left for dead, but recovered. After father's death we went back down in Parker County and remained there until the winter of 1861-2, then moved to Cooke County, and often had to leave there on account of the Indians, sometimes going as far east as Collin County.
In 1863, on Christmas day, the Indians made a raid on the head of Elm, where the large town of Saint Jo now stands, and all of the people went to the old Spanish fort on Red River for protection. They killed many people and stole lots of stock in this raid. I knew a little