William Hepworth Dixon, White Conquest: Volume 1

“A fine country, Sir, but wild,” says a stockraiser, with whom we swap drinks at a roadside bar ; “everything is wild. You can only keep a cow tame for a year or so. All herds go back on nature. I brought some short-horns out from Essex; in three lives they have all gone back to long-horns.”

A Texan builds no cattle-sheds. Once he has turned his herds into the grazing lands, he lets them run wild, and stay out all the year. Who knows what happens with such herds?

If left alone all animals go wild; a steer but some degrees faster than a lad. The son of a White man who had been stolen as a child by Kickapoos and mated in their tribe has been found as savage as an ordinary Kickapoo.

Some persons blame the Negroes as the evil demons of this country, charging them with a propensity to acts of violence, a disposition to abuse whatever favour they obtain, and an extreme antipathy to family order and domestic arts. Some grains of truth there are in what these critics urge.