Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 7.
Reverend J. William Jones, Ed.

[455] pay. Finding himself in a strange country without friends or money, Forrest, with the characteristic energy which distinguished him in after life, split rails at fifty cents per hundred and made the money necessary to bring him back to his family and home.

Without tracing him through the steps by which he accumulated a fortune, it is enough to say that at sixteen years of age he was left fatherless, with a mother and large family to support on a small leased farm, and at forty years of age he was the owner of a large cotton plantation and slaves, making about one thousand bales of cotton per annum, and engaged in a prosperous business in Memphis, the largest city of his native State. His personal courage had been severely tested on several occasions; notably at Hernando, Mississippi, where he was assaulted in the streets by three Matlock brothers and their overseer Bean. Pistols and bowieknives were freely used, and after a terrible fight, in which thirteen shots were fired, the three Matlocks and Forrest all wounded, his assailants fled and left him master of the field.