Personal Narrative: Life After The Civil War

The year is 1880 and The Civil War ended fifteen years ago, my family is struggling to sustain on the meager income that I make, working for the general store in the city of Richmond, Virginia. Fifteen years after the war, buildings have gaping holes from the cannons and few bridges have been repaired. The Union army took anything of value and left the city of Richmond broken. Times are tough, I have a wife and three children to support, reluctantly we make the hard decision to leave our home and go west. Before the war, my family owned a prosperous farm and after the Union burned it down; we have nothing except for the meager wages I make at the store. Farming seems to make the most sense for us, so we will go west to Texas and try our luck

A few more weeks traveling and we reached the homestead site in eastern Texas. This seems like good land to grow cotton; I thought. Luckily, many other before us could show us what we must do, since the plains of Texas had no lumber to build a cabin. By working long hours, clearing the tall prairie grasses and sleeping in make shift tents at night we finally built our “soddie” and at least had a roof over our heads. The next task was to find a source of water the creek about a half mile down would suffice for now. My wife was strong along with our two boys they carried water to the house. The sod made our home surprisingly “cool” in the Texas heat. All four of us worked from sun up to sundown to clear land for fields and attempt to fence in our property. A buck board and a team of horses mad life easier that we purchased after my wife Sara was able to sell her handmade quilts to a wealthy cattle baron. We had missed the first planting season; I managed to scrape together enough money to get us through for the winter by hiring myself and our horses out. The winter was brutal and the wind blew on the prairie at least fifty miles per hour at times. We burned buffalo chips to stay warm, since there wasn’t much wood around us. I now know what harsh winters on the plains of Texas are