again, this time southward, for a crop near Eatonton.  Gideon then left his father after a quarrel and spent several years as a clerk in stores here and there, as a county tax collector and as a farmer, and began to read medicine in odd moments.  He now married, about the beginning of the year 1815, and rejoined his father who was about to cross the Indian country to settle in Alabama.  But they had barely begun this journey when the father, while tipsy, bought a farm on the Georgia frontier, where the two families settled and Gideon interspersed deer hunting with his medical reading.  Next spring the cavalcade crossed the five hundred miles of wilderness in six weeks, and reached the log cabin village of Tuscaloosa, where Gideon built a house.  But provisions were excessively dear, and his hospitality to other land seekers from Georgia soon consumed his savings.  He began whipsawing lumber, but after disablement from a gunpowder explosion he found lighter employment in keeping a billiard room.  He then set out westward again, breaking a road for his wagon as he went.  Upon reaching the Tombigbee River he built a clapboard house in five days, cleared land from its canebrake, planted corn with a sharpened stick, and in spite of ravages from bears and raccoons gathered a hundred and fifty bushels from six acres.  When the town of Columbus, Mississippi, was founded nearby in 1819 he sawed boards to build a house on speculation.  From this he was diverted to the Indian trade, bartering whiskey, cloth and miscellaneous goods for peltries.  He then became a justice of the peace and school commissioner at Columbus, surveyed and sold town lots on public account, and built two school houses with the proceeds.  He then moved up the river to engage anew in the Indian trade with a partner who soon proved a drunkard.  He and his wife there took a fever which after baffling the physicians was cured by his own prescription.  He then moved to Cotton Gin Port to take charge of a store, but was invalided for three years by a sunstroke.  Gradually recovering, he lived in the woods on light diet until the thought occurred to him of carrying a company of Choctaw ball players on a tour of the United States.  The tour was made, but the receipts barely covered expenses.  Then in 1830, Lincecum set himself up as a physician at Columbus.  No sooner had he built up a practice, however, than he became dissatisfied with allopathy and went to study herb remedies among the Indians; and thereafter he practiced botanic medicine.  In 1834 he went as surgeon with an exploring party to Texas and found that country so attractive that after some years further at Columbus he spent the rest of his long life in Texas as a planter, physician and student of natural history.  He died there in 1873 at the age of eighty years.[13]

[Footnote 13:  F.L.  Riley, ed., “The Autobiography of Gideon Lincecum,” in the Mississippi Historical Society Publications, VIII, 443-519.]