previous next
“ [60] hope your father continued well and enjoyed his usual celebration of the Fourth of July; mine was spent, after a march of thirty miles on one of the branches of the Brazos, under my blanket, elevated on four sticks driven in the ground, as a sunshade. The sun was fiery hot, the atmosphere like the blast from a hot-air furnace, the water salt, still my feelings for my country were as ardent, my faith in her future as true, and my hopes for her advancement as unabated as they would have been under better circumstances.”

A week later, having received intelligence of the death of his youngest sister, Mildred, who, having married a Mr. Childe, had removed to and was a resident of Paris, France, he writes: “The news came to me very unexpectedly, and in the course of nature I might never have anticipated it, as indeed I had never realized that she could have preceded me on the unexplored journey upon which we are all hastening. Though parted from her for years, with little expectation but of a transient reunion in this life, this terrible and sudden separation has not been the less distressing because it was distant and unlooked for. It has put an end to all hope of our meeting in this world. It has cut short my early wishes and daily yearnings, and so vividly does she live in my imagination and affection that I can not realize she only exists in my memory. I pray that her life has but just begun, and I trust that our merciful God only so suddenly and early snatched her away because he then saw that it was the fittest moment to take her to himself. May a pure and eternal life now be hers, and may we all live so that when we die it may be open to us.” On the 25th of the same month he tells Mrs. Lee: “I shall leave here on the 1st proximo for the Rio Grande, and shall be absent from two and a half to three months; will go from here to Fort Mason and pick up Major Thomas 1 and take him on with me, and thus have him as a traveling companion all the way, which will be a great comfort to me.” And then mentioning the Comanche raids on the settlers of Texas, he says: “These people give a world of trouble to man and horse, and, poor creatures, they are not worth it.”

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Texas (Texas, United States) (1)
Paris (France) (1)
Mason (Texas, United States) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
George H. Thomas (2)
Mildred (1)
Robert E. Lee (1)
Edward Childe (1)
hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
July 4th (1)
25th (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: