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631
experience was hard on me and I endured many hardships and privations, sleeping on the bare ground nearly three months after I was captured. In 1864 our regiment was stationed on Galveston Island and remained there until the end of the war, and we had an easy time there. Our duty was to ride the beach five miles. and back every two hours and watch on a signal station day and night. The enemy's warships would come around and shell us occasionally, but never any of us got covered up with sand except one time when one of the big shells weighing 164 pounds hit near us.
the summer of 1864 yellow fever broke out in Galveston and fourteen members of our company were stricken. Captain C. D. McRae and James Cowley died. Our company was camped on the west end of the Island during the last year of the war.
In the fall of 1865 I went to school at Moulton, Lavaca county, and in 1866 I went to Live oak county where I secured a wagon and ox team and hauled freight from Indianola to San Antonio. That fall I hired to a man named H. Williams who lived on Lagorta Creek, thirty miles from Oakville. Only a very few settlements were there at that time. One family named Weaver lived about a mile from the Williams place, and there were two grown girls in the Weaver family. These girls would assist their father in hunting cattle, and carried their pistols with them wherever they went. They had a pack of hounds and hunted with them. One day they found where a panther had killed a colt belonging to their father, ten miles from their home, so they came to the Williams ranch and got two of Mr. Williams' daughters to go with them to hunt the panther. About one o'clock in the morning two of the girls came back to get help to kill the panther as they had found it. Mr. Williams sent me to help them, giving me an old Enfield rifle to use. We reached the place where the other two girls were about daylight, and found they had the panther treed.