Have you ever heard how Grandma when she was a young girl made the
first corn crop in Texas, and how the only tools she had to make it
with were a hound dog and a big stick? This is the way she told the
story.
After Stephen F. Austin had secured the grant of land for his colony in
Texas, he returned to his home and gathered the families to settle it.
He leased the schooner Lively at New Orleans, loaded it with farm tools
and supplies, and sent it to the mouth of the Colorado River to meet
the colonists. The Lively was lost, and no word of her or her crew has
ever been heard. [138]
Meanwhile, Grandma and her family were on their way in an ox wagon. She
walked nearly all the way with her sister behind the wagon. They
entered Texas at the Red River, and reached the mouth of the Colorado
about Christmas. Here they built a cabin and waited in vain for the
Lively. The men hunted and the women kept house. They ate venison for
bread and fresh bear steak for meat. They needed bread, but had no
tools for planting the corn.
Now the Colorado River bottom was covered with a heavy growth of reed
cane. The dogs ran a bear into this canebrake and the boys set it on
fire, and as it burned the cane popped and roared like guns in a
battle. When the fire was out, where the canebrake had been was a
wonderfully clean field, covered with ashes and as loose and mellow as
plowed land.
Grandma took a sharp stick and punched the holes, and her sister
dropped a grain of corn in each hole and then covered it with her foot.
In a few days a beautiful crop of corn was growing, but the ground was
also covered with young shoots of cane. The planters had neither plow
nor hoe but they took big sticks and went in the field and knocked down
all the tender cane shoots; they did this three times and then the corn
was big enough to shade out the cane. But when the roasting ears began
to make, the coons began to destroy the crop. So Grandma tied an old
hound dog in the midst of the corn field, and he barked all night and
scared the varmints away. The colonists soon had plenty of bread, and
before time to plant the next crop they had secured farming tools from
the East.