My life and lectures

Contents

FAOK

Introduction 9

I

II

Parentage — Escapade with wild cats — Exploding " ghost " and " witch " theories — Visits to grandparents — Partnership of my father with William Jacob Thompson — Protecting the government archives — Life with the Indians 18

III Prestige as a marksman — The Flat-Head Indians — My encounter with a grizzly — Finding evidences of the " Cliff-Dwellers " — Walk home a distance of 750 miles after living three years with the Comanches 28

IV

Arrival home — Mistaken for an Indian — Tortured by wearing clothing and sleeping in beds — Jeers of neighborhood children — Sent to Professor Bingham's school 89

V

Parting with my mother — Run away from Professor Bingham's school — Home again — Sent to sea — Life on the Vincens — Return home in December, 1846 — Join Perry's expedition to Japan in 1853

— Explorations in the Far East 45

4 CONTENTS

VI

Enlist in Russian army — Siege of Sevastopol — Rewarded for marksmanship — Back to Austin — Death of my mother — Explorations in Central and South America — Enlistment in Confederate army at Pensacola 59

VII

Life in camp — Opening guns of the war — The first battle — My father's bravery — Intense thirst saves me from an untimely grave — In the hospital — On guard 68

VIII

Comrade Moore shot on relieving me of picket duty — My vow of vengeance — Writing the poem, " All Quiet Along the Potomac " — Stricken with measles — " The massacre at Ball's Bluff " — Our life at winter quarters near Leesburg .... 79

IX

Hair-breadth escapes — Am appointed scout to General Jackson — My appreciation of General Jackson — The Romney Expedition — Jackson's splendid generalship and military genius — My personal experiences in Jackson's campaigns . . 90

X

Presented with saber by General Ewell — Turner Ashby — General Jackson's version of the " Gallop of Death " — Jackson's retreat up the Valley of Virginia — Death of Ashby — In the Shenandoah Valley — In the hospital at Charlottesville 104

XI

Back to camp — At Cedar Mountain — Receive my discharge from the army — Remain in camp at request of General Jackson — Exhibit my marksmanship to General Lee at his request — I report to General J. E. B. Stuart — The " Second Manassas " battle 122

CONTENTS 6

XII

At Frederick City — With Jackson at Harper's Ferry — ^Receive letter of dismissal from my sweetheart — Battle of Sharpsburg — With Jackson at Fredericksburg — Advance of Hooker's Army — Bravery of dying Confederate soldiers . . . 140

XIII Ordered to General Joseph E. Johnston's headquarters — Am sent with supplies and dispatches to General John C. Pemberton — My most perilous undertaking — " Whistling Dick " — Adventures at Vicksburg 156

Battle of Chickamauga — I make frequent raids — My

first spree — Battle of Missionary Ridge . . . 205

XVII

Receive orders from General Forrest — Am captured by Colonel G. W. Gaines — The Dutch jailer — Offered freedom — Am forwarded to Louisville — My escape — Am ordered to report to General Stuart in Virginia — My journey to Virginia . 214

6 CONTENTS

XVIII Arrival at General Stuart's headquarters — Battle of the Wilderness — " Jackson's Ghost " — Death of General Stuart — At Spottsylvania Court House — Captured and sent to Fort Delaware . . . 231

XIX

At Fort Delaware — On board the Crescent — In Charleston harbor — Under fire of our own guns — I agree to be exchanged for Major Harry White 237

XX

At General Hardee's headquarters — I refuse to be exchanged for White — Confederate prison at Charleston — I am exchanged for Major Charles P. Mattocks — Yankees refuse to accept the exchange and I go back to Morris Island . . . 248

XXI

At Roper Hospital at Charleston — Reply to accusation of apropriating to my own use supplies sent to prisoners by me — Spend Christmas holidays at Montgomery — Assigned to duty around Petersburg — Rendered cripple for life . . . . 259

XXII Lee's surrender — Refused a parole — Go to Yazoo Valley — Make contract to gin cotton for Dr. Jiggets — Before the Grand Jury at Yazoo City 263

XXIII

I teach school — My marriage — Make Austin my home — The birth of our son — Surveying in Yazoo Valley — Retrospection 274

LECTURES ON "AMERICA; THE OLD WORLD," AND OTHER SUBJECTS

Situation of the Garden of Eden — The glories of the aurora borealis — North America undoubtedly the region of the earliest civilization . . . . 281

CONTENTS 7

WHERE DID CAIN GET HIS WIFE? ]

The sixth era of creation — The first men and women {

— The superior being of the eighth era — Adam !

and Eve — Cain's wife a creature of the sixth era 294 i

j

THE MOUND BUILDERS !

Civilization first attained along the range of the An- i dean Mountains — From here spread to the shores

of Asia and Africa — Negroes the Mound-Build- ]

ers under taskmasters — The potter's art — Life |

of the Mound-Builders 307

I

WHAT BECAME OF THE MOUND-BUILDERS? |

Miscegenation the true cause of their disappearance j

— Moses and the Israelites — A warning to this !

nation — The Negro 325 \

THE DARWINIAN THEORY ^

The survival of the fittest — Empedocles precursor of i

Darwin — Darwin theory tenable up to the eighth j

era of creation — " The Immortality of Love " — j

Darwin's theory not in conflict with the Mosaic I

account of man's creation — The blessings of God i

— Eternity 344 i

Introduction

In offering this book to the public I have been impelled by no desire to attain notoriety or hope of making money out of it, but as garbled accounts of many of the incidents I shall herein relate have long been public property, and read and reread in many lands, I feel it a duty I owe, not only to the reading public, but to myself and descendants, that I give the cold facts just as they occurred. I shall make no attempt to write history, or give details of great battles, I shall narrate what I saw with my own eyes and what occurred to me individually, and I will be as brief with each event as possible, and where they are of great importance to me personally I shall be minute in my word painting, and truthfully convey the scene and incident to the mind of the reader.

For more than a third of a century I have been urged and entreated by my legions of friends to give these incidents to the public, but until now I have been restrained from the fear that I would be looked upon as an egotistical braggart — for my long life, of more than three-quarters of a century, has been a busy and eventful one, and filled with adventures in every clime under the sun. And whether in early childhood as a schoolboy, or as an Indian, a captive, on the wild Western plains of my own native State, as sailor, soldier, explorer, hunter, or civil engineer, I have been guided by devotion, concentration, and absolute persistence in the duties involved in whatever enterprise or calling I at the time engaged in. I always tried to excel in whatever I undertook. I was taught in my early childhood by one of the best of mothers that whatever was worth doing was worth doing well, and this idea has always been uppermost in my mind, and has been my guide through life.

An old Latin idiom in early life appealed to me, and

I adopted it, " Aut viam, mveniam, aut faciam.^^ Broadly translated, " I will find a way, or make one." This has carried me through many a wilderness, and cheered me and forced paths over seemingly insurmountable difficulties, and brought me to havens of safety through many storms.

In my explorations I followed no guides. I led the way and blazed the paths. In hunting the wild animals of the jungle I made no haphazard shots at them, I shot to kill. In battle I saw my country's foes, those whose duty it was to slay me or my companions, and to slay them was the duty I had to perform. Hence, I loaded my rifle to kill. And, when I came in contact with those vast hordes of foreign hirelings who entered the Federal Army during the great " Confederate War " for gold alone, and not from patriotism or love of country, I felt it a solemn, a God-given duty, a privilege to kill them ; and I thanked my Creator that he had given me steady hands and good eyes to hold and direct my missiles of death, for they were only fit to feed the buzzards of our Southland. They had sold their very souls for gold, and I took delight in piling their carcases in mounds to feed the fowls of the air. And I would do it again, under the same conditions, a thousand times over.

My early training and life with the Comanche Indians imbued me with a spirit that made me never forget an enemy or desert a friend, hence I always smote my enemies and loved and helped my friends, and did my duty as my God-given conscience dictated and approved.

And here, to-day, in my little, humble cottage home in the village of Lyon, in the beautiful and most fertile region of earth near the banks of the Sunflower River, in the great plain of the Yazoo Delta of the Mississippi Valley, where the whir and hum of the mighty wheels of that far-reaching, civilizing, ^nd educating railroad, the Illinois Central, daily and hourly reminds me of the busy outside world, I sit and dream over the past, enjoying the confidence and esteem of friends and neighbors, and, above all, blest with the love of a truly womanly woman, whose tender touch and devout ministrations for forty years have smoothed the wrinkles from my brow, and have made my pathway, once so rugged and bloodstained, smooth and level, and covered the dark, crimson-dyed spots on it with pure white lilies-of-the-valley, and filled my vase with the perfume of star jasmine and violets. And with my brow still caressed by her loving hand, and my lips kissed by hers and those of my loved children and grandchildren, I feel at peace with all the world.

For the part I took in the war I feel a just pride, and have no apologies to make. I leave my acts and deeds a legacy to my loved ones and their descendants ; and were I to go over the same long four years of bloody warfare again, as in the sixties, I would not alter a single step, but pursue the same pathways to the end. I love my sunny Southland as only a son can love a mother. And to those dear old comrades with whom I ate, drank, slept, marched, fought, and shared the prison fare I tender a comrade's love. I feel that if we meet no more on earth we shall soon do so in the " Bivouac beyond the Stars," and that we shall rest in the beautiful vales of Paradise and enjoy the smiles of a just, approving God.

Chapter I

Birthplace — Personal appearance — Educated in early years by a Polish exile — Sent to Onion Creek school — Ran away from home — Stolen by Indians.

I WAS born in Captain John Christman's tent, on Laberde Prairie, on the headwaters of the Yegua River, near where the small village of Gay Hill was afterward built, in what is now Washington County, Texas, on the 10th of October, 1829. My mother has often told me that at my birth I weighed only three pounds, clothes and all, and that when a week old she slipped her wedding ring over my hand up to my shoulder. At sixteen years of age I weighed only fifty-eight pounds.

At the beginning of the war in 1861 I was six feet and one-quarter of an inch in height, and weighed one hundred and sixty pounds, and my face was as smooth as a girl's, and as free from whiskers. In my babyhood days and early childhood my father determined that I should be a preacher, a missionary to some foreign clime, and he wished me educated with this end in view. I was taught my letters from a Latin grammar, and began the study of that language as soon as I mastered the alphabet, Greek and Hebrew followed.

When but three years of age there came into our camp an old man, a Polish exile, a baron of German birth, by the name of Homvosky. He was a graduate of Heidelberg, and was a general in the Polish Army, and had been banished from Europe upon the downfall of Poland.

This old man took a great fancy to me, and for years I slept with him. He would wash and dress me, and I almost worshiped him. He taught me my Latin, Greek, and Hebrew lessons, and, what I liked best, how to box, wrestle, fence, with both foil and saber, and how to ride, and shoot the rifle and pistol. Many a long ride over the prairies, on his shoulders, have I taken, when in search of deer, or turkeys, or wild animals of that region.

When on these tramps he would fill my youthful mind with history of great events that had occurred in ages past. Under his kind and steady hand, for nearly seven years, my young mind expanded rapidly, and I was almost as well versed in the languages and ancient histories, and almost as far advanced in mathematics as many of our college graduates of to-day.

Just before my tenth birthday my old friend passed into the " Great Beyond," and left a void in my life — my first great sorrow.

At that time we were in camp where the city of Austin now stands. There were not enough children in our camp to employ a teacher, but about seven miles south of Austin, on the banks of Onion Creek, was a larger settlement, known as the Tom McKinney branch of Austin's colony. Here, in a wooden-framed, cloth-covered schoolhouse, some twenty or more of the colonists' children daily studied under the tutelage of an old red-headed, Scotch-Irish, Presbyterian schoolmaster.

Soon after the death of my grand old Baron-exiled friend and teacher I was sent to the Onion Creek school by my father. I had to ford the Colorado River, and ride across a wide prairie studded with live-oaks and dogwood thickets, and here and there a few post-oaks. Many of the live-oaks were draped in mustang grape vines, on which hung great clusters of these fragrant, luscious, and juicy fruit. The landscape was one to awake all the poetry in the soul of a young and ardent lover of nature.

Each morning and evening, on my Indian pony, I rode the seven miles that lay between the school and my home. I did not fancy my teacher— our spirits were not in accord. He was as far off from my old exiled friend in intellect and soul as the earth from the sun, and he was a stem and strict disciplinarian. He did not believe in sparing the rod and spoiling the child, as he held a switch ever ready in his hand, and upon the least provocation, from boy or girl, he let it fall upon the offender with force, or gently as a reminder. I could feel neither love nor respect for him.

Among the pupils was a young girl just budding into womanhood, a Miss Mary Stone, whose father had been captured by Mexicans in what is known in Texas history as the Mier expedition. These men, some two hundred and fifty strong, had made a raid into Mexico, and been captured by the soldiers of Santa Anna and confined in the castle of San Perote, down in Mexico, and every tenth man condemned to die. They were not chosen by name or number by their captors, but their selection left to the chance of drawing from twenty-five black beans and two hundred and twenty-five white. Each prisoner was required to step up and draw a bean from the hat, where they had all been placed. Those drawing black ones were shot.

Mary's father drew a white one, and thus for the present was safe, though still a prisoner, and suffering all the tortures that a half-civilized people inflict on helpless men when in their power.

My sympathy and love went out to Mary in her distress at the uncertainty of her father's fate. She would take me in her lap, and curl my long hair, kiss me, and call me her little sweetheart, and I almost worshiped her. She was beginning the study of Latin, and I would write her exercises, and thus keep her at the head of her class. One evening, just at recess, someone informed the teacher that I aided Mary and kept her at the head of the class. Without any warning he carried me down to the spring, which was just under the bluff, a short distance from the tent-house in which he taught, and near the spring, in the shadow of an old cottonwood log, he repeated a verse from the Bible, about sparing the rod and spoihng the child; he then knelt, and prayed a short prayer, in which he asked his Heavenly Father to forgive the awful crime of which I had been guilty, and then rose, and catching me by my long hair, almost lifting me from the ground, he administered an awful whipping, such as I had never felt before.

The first terrible blow from the lash almost took my breath, and the sting of it sent a thrill through every fiber of my being. I started to scream, but caught my breath and shut my teeth together, and let every muscle grow rigid, and made no sound. He might have cut me in two and I would not have flinched.

Such feelings as crept over me are indescribable. I determined to have revenge on him for the outrage and pain inflicted, and I grew as calm and stolid as if made of stone.

When he had finished I saw the blood trickling down my feet from his cruel blows. I started straight up the bluflp, my feet and hands clasping the limestone steps that we boys had cut in the soft rock to aid us in climbing its perpendicular sides. My intentions were to reach and saddle my pony, and gallop away toward my home before my teacher could reach the school grounds, and prevent me, as he would have to go down the creek, some hundred yards, before he could get up on the bluff", and by the time he reached the tent I would be on my pony and flying across the prairie out of his reach.

Just as I got to the top of the bluff* I looked down and saw him climbing up close behind me. I did not hesitate a moment ; I , gathered a stone, sharp and jagged-edged, and with all the strength and pent-up anger I felt I sent it at his head, and struck him fair in the forehead just as he was lifting his eyes to see how near he was to the top.

As my stone struck, he dropped like a dead man to the bottom. I felt a great load, as it were, lifted from my soul; I felt that I had fully avenged my wrongs without aid from anyone. I took my bucket and books, saddled my pony, and without saying a word to anyone I mounted, and with a light heart rode home.

Some two or three hours after my arrival I was chagrined and surprised to see the old fellow, all covered with soot and blood, ride up to our tent, dismount, and go in. In a few moments I was called by my father, and I saw my old teacher, covered with blood and his head bound in cobwebs and soot, and his brown linen suit, that had been washed and bleached until white, showed him up as the bloodiest man I had ever seen alive.

I found that he had given my father his side of the controversy, and I made no defense. I aimed to kill him as he climbed the bluff behind me, and had failed, and I was disappointed.

My father gave me another terrible whipping in the presence of my teacher, and I bore it with the same unflinching stoicism, and without a sound. But I made up my mind, while the lash burned my tender skin, that never again would I attend school under the old Scotchman. Yes, I would die first.

I there determined to run away from home the next day, and go to Mexico, to Castle San Perote, where Mary's father was a prisoner, and live with the Mexicans, where neither my father nor teacher would dare to come to hunt me.

That night I molded bullets, with two negro boys, until late in the night, and secured a large buffalo horn, containing five pounds of powder, for my little rifle. The rifle was a present from General M. B. Lamar, and my shotpouch a gift from General Sam Houston. I put my bullets in one end and my powderhorn in the other of a rawhide sack or wallet, as they were called in those days, and hid them in a crevice of a bluff on the river, just above the ford on the bank of the Colorado, where I daily crossed it on my way to school. The next morning I took my rifle, and a few charges of powder in the horn attached, and my bucket of lunch, and satchel of books, and, giving my mother an extra hug and kiss, I mounted my pony and rode away. As soon as I crossed the divide between the river and Onion Creek I set my satchel of books and bucket in the trail, and turning southwest I put my pony in a lope, and struck the trail that led from Austin to San Antonio, entering the latter near Manchac Spring, about twelve miles from Austin. I turned down the trail in a gallop, and rode up on the bluff that overlooks the San Marcos Springs. The trail makes a sudden turn to the east and follows down the river on top of the bluff for some distance, before descending to the ford. Just as I made the turn I saw, standing directly in front of me in the trail, an Indian in his war paint, and with his bow at a ready. My first impulse was to raise my rifle and kill him before he could shoot me, but my gun was in its sling and swung to the pommel of my saddle, so I merely checked the speed of my pony and rode straight up to him.

As I approached the thought entered my brain, " Why not go with the Indians, instead of the Mexicans.?" and I made up my mind at once to go with them. I rode up and stopped, and he said in very good English :

"Where going.''"

Without hesitation or the least embarrassment I answered, " With the Indians."

" That's good, give me gun."

I handed him my rifle, and as I did so I glanced back up the trail, and at the very spot from which I would have tried to shoot my captor about thirty other warriors had risen out of tall mesquite grass. They came in a body down the road, and each took a good look at me, several saying in very good English:

"How do.?"

They exchanged my pony for a fresher one, as my long gallop of some seventeen or eighteen miles had begun to tell on him, and mounted me on one of theirs, and we started off in a northwesterly direction.

Chapter II

Parentage — Escapade with wild cats — Exploding " ghost " and " witch " theories — Visits to grandparents — partnership of my father with William Jacob Thompson — Protecting the government archives — Life with the Indians.

Before going into the details of my long captivity of four years and three months among them, the reader must indulge me for a while, as I give a short history of myself and parents prior to my life among this fierce band of Comanches.

Both of my parents were natives of Virginia. Father was born in Henry County, at the old family residence of Patrick Henry, who was his great-grandfather on his father's side. John Fontaine, his grandfather, married Martha, the oldest daughter of Patrick Henry, and they named their first-born after Patrick Henry, and Patrick Henry Fontaine married Nancy Dabney Miller, and my father. Rev. Edward Fontaine, was the oldest child, and first great-grandson of the immortal Patrick Henry.

My father was born on Leatherwood Creek, in Henry County, on the 5th of August, 1800.

My mother was bom at the old homestead of the Maurys, in Albemarle County, Virginia, on September 13, 1805. Her father moved to Tennessee when she was an infant, and Maury County was named after him.

On the 10th of September, 1828, they were married at the old homestead near Columbia, in Maury County, and went at once to Texas with Stephen F. Austin, who had received valuable grants of land, and other inducements, from the Mexican authorities to induce emigration and the colonization of the territory.

My grandfather took up his residence at Pontotoc, in Pontotoc County, Mississippi, in 1834, and for several years, under President Jackson's Administration, was surveyor general of public lands south of Tennessee, and had his land office at Pontotoc.

When a child only six years old I was carried to see my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and kinfolks in and around Pontotoc.

I well remember the looks of the great logs the negroes were hewing in long straight lines to build the houses to live in. They were a novelty to me, as my home had ever been a tent, and I asked my grandfather how he was going to take all those great logs with him when he went to move his tent.'' This, of course, provoked a laugh at my expense, and exposed my ignorance to the crowd, and my mother had to tell them that I had never lived in a house, but always in a tent that could be moved about to suit our nomadic life on the prairies of our Texas home:

I had several boyish escapades that were somewhat ludicrous, while we stayed at grandfather's. One I well remember.

Grandpa was very fond of cats, and he had a dozen or more that at each meal he would feed out on the brick walk at the front porch; and there were a number that lived out on the lot around the stables and barns, and these were wild and would not come about the house. Grandma constantly complained that cats destroyed the young chickens, and ought to be destroyed; so, at her suggestion, grandpa offered us a picayune for each pair of cat ears we would bring him. Under the guidance of Billy Bradford, my uncles, Edmund Winston and Charles Fontaine, we organized a brigade of " cat hunters," and proceeded to destroy all the cats we could find around and about the barns and stables. But the cats seemed to have had warning of our intentions, and only two or three yielded us their ears, after a long and exciting chase. But nearer the house we found several tame ones ; these we did not kill, but merely cut off their ears.

That night I offered the spoils of the chase to my grandfather, and received fifty cents in picayunes for my reward. But the next morning, when the old! man went to feed his pets, seven hoisted their tails and came rushing up to him, bloody around their heads and minus their ears.

He said nothing on the porch as he gazed at his shorn pets, but he walked out to a young, long-limbed elm and cut a nice keen switch, went into his office, and called me in. I had to obey. As I entered he aslced if I still had the money he paid me for catching the wild cats out at the barn.'' " Yes, sir," I said.

" Well, give it back to me, I paid you too much."

He held out his hand and I dropped the picayunes

one by one into it. He took out seven, and then

handed me back the rest, and I started to go, but he

said:

" I am not through my settlement with you yet ; don't I owe you something else.'' "

I knew by intuition what was coming — my conscience told me this, and I answered : " No, sir,"

" But I do," he said, " and I am going to pay you now."

And he did, and it made an impression on me that has never been effaced.

Upon another occasion, to get revenge for this whipping, I played a practical joke on him that was cruel in the extreme.

Every afternoon, after dinner, he would take a nap for a few minutes, and then get up and go in his garden and weed or work among his vegetables for exercise and recreation. On the day I remember so well it was washday, and the women had been washing. They had stretched a clothes line from the posts around the well to another in front of the back window of the office in which grandpa took his nap. I heard him snoring, and knew that he was sound asleep. I caught two of the largest old tomcats that were asleep on the gallery, and handling them gently I tied their tails together, and slipped up to the clothes line and threw them across it, and then hid behind the well curb and shed to watch the outcome. The cats at once made their presence known, and soon I heard grandpa say