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company with two friends, Messrs. Cooper and Smith, he set out on horseback for the Lone Star State. Cooper and Smith located at Austin, but father went on to Hays county, where he bought land in the new town of Cannonville, owned and sponsored by Mr. Rufus Cannon and later run against San Marcos for the county seat. Father wrote glowing letters to Mother, telling of the wonderland he had found, of the trees, flowers, knee high grass and abundance of crystal clear water. There was a gushing spring at the corner of the lot he planned to build our house on and he urged Mother to pack up and come as soon as possible. On June 27, 1856, Mother's twenty-seventh birthday, she started to Texas, via New Orleans with her four children, Charles, the eldest aged nine years, myself seven, and two half brothers, Albert and William Heaton, aged four and two years respectively. I will never forget the sea voyage on the "Charles Morgan" from New Orleans to Galveston with its sea-sickness and seemingly never-ending smell of tar and rope. The overland journey to Austin was made by stage coach and there we stopped with Mr. and Mrs. Smith, who lived in a double loghouse on Congress Ave.
Father came to Austin a day or two after we arrived and we were overjoyed to .see him. The next day Father hitched up the oxen, "Lion" and "Berry," to a big covered wagon and we left our kind Louisiana friends for a wilderness and strangers. We children enjoyed each step of the journey, as we would get .out of the wagon, gather flowers, shells and all kinds of pretty rocks, wondering the while if we would ever reach " Cannonville. " If I remember rightly there was only one house that could be seen from the road in the two days that it took to make the twenty-five miles, as the oxen never went faster than a walk. Cannonvile was situated about three miles south of where the village of Dripping Springs now stands. We lived three months with the Cannon family before our house was finished. We carried water