When I was fifteen, the war broke out between the north and the south.  My father saw that Missouri would be the battle ground and he, with many others, took their families and negroes and went south, taking what they could in wagons, for there were no railroads then in that section.  There was quite a train with the droves of cattle, mules and horses.  One wagon had six yoke of oxen to it; had to get into it by a ladder, the kind that was used to freight across the plains.  The family went in the family carriage that my father brought from Kentucky.  I remember the time when this carriage was purchased, with the two dapple gray horses, and silver mounted harness, and when my mother would drive out she had a driver in broadcloth, with a high silk hat, and a boy rode on a seat behind, to open the gates.  This was one of the ways of traveling in Kentucky in those days.  My mother was an aristocrat in her ideas, but my father was not.  He liked no display.  He was wise enough to see the sin and folly of it.

{illust. caption =
this is the picture of my girlhood home in Cass county, Mo. 
Under the trees of this dear old place I listened
to the sweet story of my love of A man murdered by drink. 
“When thou hast loved one living man, then mayest thou look
upon the dead.”}

After being on the road six weeks, we stopped in Grayson County, Texas, and bought a farm.  As we started from Missouri one of the colored women took sick with typhoid fever.  This spread so that ten of the family, white, and black, were down at one time.  As soon as we could travel, my father left the colored people south, and took his family back to Missouri.  That winter south was a great blessing to me, for I recovered from a disease that had made me an invalid for five years—­ consumption of the bowels.  Poor health had keep me out of school a great deal.  My father at one time sent me to Mrs. Tillery’s boarding school in Independence, Mo., but I was not in the recitation room more than half of the time.

After I recovered my health in Texas, it was my delight to ride on horseback with a girl friend.  The southern boys were preparing to go to war.  Many a sewing did we attend, where the mothers had spun and woven the gray cloth that they were now working up so sorrowfully for their sons to be buried in, far away from home.  They thought their cause was right.  There were many good masters.  And again there were bad ones.  Whiskey is always a cruel tyrant and is a worse evil than chattel slavery.  We were often stopped on our trip by southern troops, in the Territory and Texas, and then again by northerners.  We passed over the Pea Ridge battle ground shortly after the battle.  Oh! the horrors of war.  We often stopped at houses where the wounded were.  We let them have our pillows and every bit of bedding we could spare.  We went to our home in Cass County, Missouri.