Shiloh, Lamar County, August 4^th 1867

 

My very dear Daughter

                                    I have received your answer and was indeed very glad to receive your answer to my letter from Clarksville, but since I have been at this elyseum I wrote you a long letter, describing this my new home for Texas. When I wrote a kind Virginia gentleman who lives here in a large house with a charming grown up daughter and two rather rough hewn and neglected sons had agreed to let us have house-room for all my folks for a year. he was to allow us 5 rooms of this mansion which we were to furnish &c. and live to ourselves. This would require the remnant of our households to be here before my folks would arrive and it would require my individual aid to bring them here and early in October would have been the most agreeable time to travel and the means we could now control would hardly be sufficient at the present time to buy a waggon and horses and incur the necessary expenses of getting them here. I wrote to John about it and he wrote back a despondent letter. he has you know the control and management of every thing. He wrote of trying to fix up on the school house lot a place to stay at and seemed / to consider the great hope of getting to Texas a forlorn hope. Since that time he has gone into the mail carrying and having chills and has forgot to write as he promised every week and Willie has been afflicted with a sore hand and something like the flux. I have had one very business like letter from John showing how very short we are in financial matters &c &c and I have been hard at work on the Texas laws and making acquaintances and doing such things as I could individually do without means to buy or build until the present time. Instead of accepting the kind proposition of my Virginia friends (who I never got him to say how much it was to cost a year) I have embraced a chance to rent a suitable small farm in sight of Shiloh Academy (not fine but can be made comfortable) for two years at $100 specie a year in advance to commence in October next. The place has excellent water, a small apple orchard, some peaches and local shade trees situated on the great praire with some good ground for corn, besides gardens and patches and of a good quality, close by where I propose to build. I have proposed to John to drop over here and in the interim of his engagements with the contract and bring my folks, or being in the cart the two girls that they might be at the best school possible, and then duplicate the trip during the year. We shall / have to tax our ingenuity with our means to get all our treasures here, and you among the rest, but it will require all the ingenuity, energy and perseverance with a large share of forbearance to accomplish the object. he will write to me soon what we can do with our limited resources. I cannot leave here now because the Courts are coming on here the last of this month and will be in session in this Circuit until the middle of October, and I want to attend them by way of initiation into the practice, by which I hope to be able to make a living for us all. Another reason I am not physically able to travel alone on horseback to the coast for the reason that I had something like paralasis of my left leg and arm which laid me up for several days and from which I have not yet entirely recovered, tho' improving every day slowly. I think it was caused by unnecessary exposure in a trip I made to Clarksville, in which I was out at night and very much fatigued. I shall therefore after a few weeks be in Court until October, when, I will, whether alone or not, take possession of the place rented and from economical motives shall remain there as my home, taking the chances of other company from the Court. I am now absorbed in the desire to get all my household here and nothing but shortness of funds could prevent its being accomplished this fall. as it is we must take the chances as to time and very much depends upon what John can do to accomplish this great object. I suppose he has written to you frequently as usual / I have already written to you a description of this delightful region—the beautiful and inexaustible praire range for cattle and horses, the range of rich black lands nearby, the fine soil for wheat and fruits of all kinds. The blackjack, oak and hickory lands on the margin of the praire. The neighborhood of the very best class of plain country people, beautiful road on the margin of the great praire to the city of Paris about like Hopkinsville perhaps larger and growing. Fine churches and good schools. The County, one of the most populous in the state and growing rapidly. The society excellent and for young folks very extensive and congenial. No ostentation and not a great deal of individual wealth yet a greatly prosperous community. If your uncle was located here with what means he has left, he could out of stock raising make more than he now does, could raise better crops of wheat and find every thing as plentiful as he now has, finer schools and churches and more room for the boys. This is a great place for young enterprise where industry and labor is the basis. For instance if I were ready I could buy the finest praire hay on the praires for $1 to $1.50 a ton or as much as a two horse waggon can carry for $1 or four horses for $1.50, or you can cut it yourself without restraint. All the folks around me are now filling their barns and stables with an abundance of excellent hay for horses and milk cows in the winter I hope to get some between this time and October if the chance for it should run in my favor. My present hope is to get my treasure all here sometime during the year and that during the two years I have rented the place to build a new home here never to be changed. The profits of the contracts for the four years, according to John's calculation will be over $1300 a year, out of which all this is to be done. the great press will be to get here. I have / written to John that he can buy fine stud ponies here for $30 exactly suited to packing mail and in this way if means will allow he can about double his income after this year for which he has already made contracts. The trip via Buyo Sarah—Shreveport—Marshall can be made from the coast in from 12 to 15 days. No difficulty in a good season of the year. I am so very anxious to have the daughters and the boys at school oh! and such a school! that I can think of nothing else outside of my books, to which I am paying great attention now. The mother of the school teacher is an old friend of your Mama's and often enquires anxiously when she is coming. I owe a great deal of the kind treatment I have received here to that circumstance, never have been in any community that I liked so much, all so kind and unaustentatious. I am in every way well satisfied with the position I now occupy among them. Cant you send out some of your adventurous cousins to grow up with the growth and strengthen with the strength of this country. In five years we are to have a rail road from Memphis on its way to California.Tell them of the plentifulness of good material for educated wives who will know how to work as well as love. A young man here by his own labor in cropping makes from 300 to 500 a year. That would not take long to make a start. A crop of corn or wheat is easy made and is here deemed a very respectable business. I should be greatly delighted to see one of my nephews here. I have already tired you and must stop dont fail to write. Give my love to all and tell them what I say or show them this letter.

                                               

Yours affectionately                                      

W. G. Kendall

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