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490
street to get breakfast, and a toddy was suggested. After going up the street some distance, not knowing that Iowa was a dry state at that time, we stopped on the corner of a street and looked about as strangers would do, when a man standing on the opposite side, without asking a word, but, I think, from Comb's drouthy look, sized us up and said: "Go Go back two doors and go in a back room and you will find what you are looking for." We followed instructions and located.
I was born in Jefferson County, Texas, March 5, 1835. My father, Claiborn West, was one of the signers of the Declaration of Texas Independence. I entered the stock business in 1854 in Atascosa County, and afterward went up the trail twice, each time with my own cattle ; endured the usual hardships, but was not molested by Indians except when passing through the Territory, where the Osage tribe demanded toll, and I gave them a few steers. I wintered one of my herds in Nebraska and fattened them on corn which I bought at fifteen cents a bushel. I sold those steers for $5.00 per hundred pounds, which was considered a good price.
I lived on the San Miguel when the Indians were very bad. One night we had our saddle horses tied in the yard to keep the Indians from stealing them and when I went out at daylight to stake them out they were gone, but moccasin tracks showed plainly who had taken them. Notwithstanding the fact that I had two dogs in the yard which would have torn a man to pieces, those Indians got those horses without arousing the dogs.
In one Indian fight in which I was engaged I killed