|
turned. There were stirring "war times," and, as a matter of course, my young blood caught the infection. I wanted to enlist in the Rebel army and join Gen. Lee in Virginia, but my guardian, Mr. Richardson, proprietor of the News, a man of 60 years and the leader of the Secession movement in Texas, ridiculed the idea, on account of my age and size, and ended by telling me that "it's all bluster anyway. It will be ended in the next sixty days, and I will hold in my hat all the blood that's shed in this war." This statement from one whom I thought knew all about it only served to fix all the firmer my resolve to go, and go at once, before to late. So I took "French leave," and joined an artillery company at an improvised fort at Sabine Pass, Tex., where Capt. Richard Parsons, an elder brother, was in command on infantry company. Here I exercised in infantry drill and served as "powder monkey" for the cannoneers. My military enlistment expired in twelve months, where I left Fort Sabine and joined Parsons' Texas cavalry brigade, then on the Mississippi river. My brother, Maj.-Gen. W. H. Parsons (who during the war was by his soldiers invested with the sobriquet "Wild Bill"), was at that time in command of the entire cavalry outposts on the west bank of the Mississippi river from Helena to the mouth of the Red river. His cavalrymen held the advance in every movement of the trans-Mississippi army, from the defeat of the Federal General Curtis on White river to the defeat of Gen. Bank's army on Red river which closed the fighting on the west wide of the Mississippi. I was a mere boy of 15 when I joined my brother's command at the front on White river, and was afterward a member of the renowned McInoly Scouts, under Gen. Parsons' order, which participated in all the battles of the Curtis, Canby, and Banks campaigns.
On my return home to Waco, Tex., at the close of the war, I traded a good mule, all the property I possessed, for forty acres of corn in the field standing ready for harvest, to a refugee who desired to flee the country. I hired and paid wages (the first they had ever received) to a number of ex-slaves, and together we reaped the harvest. From the proceeds of its sale I obtained a sum sufficient to pay for six months' tuition at the Waco University, under control of the Rev. Dr. R. B. Burleson. Soon afterward I took up
|
