Colorado River

I can talk about the two Colorado Rivers.

Where are they? The famous Colorado River that starts in Colorado, but then there's another Colorado River that doesn't start in Colorado.

It starts in West Texas and meanders down.

Yeah.

It meanders down through Central Texas and passes through Austin, Texas.

And it's beautiful.

If you look at pictures of Austin, Texas, if you go into, uh, Google Images, Colorado River, Austin, Austin, and then go into the images.

It's very, very pretty.

My heroine, Miss Patsy Washington, was one shade darker than the Ace of Spades, while her lover, Mr. Andrew Jackson, was three colors darker than herself.

My plot was laid in African Bend on the Colorado River in southern Texas.

Everything went on nicely until about halfway through the first chapter, when Mr. Jackson was convicted and sent to Huntsville for stealing a neighbor's hog.

And while I was trying to find a substitute for him, old Patsy flew the track and eloped with a Yankee carpetbagger.

Being a store there, we rigged up in good shape.

I spent two or three months' wages for an outfit, spurs, etc., trying to make myself look like a thoroughbred cowboy from Bitter Creek.

There were three crowds of us started at the same time, one to work up the Colorado River, the other around home, and the third, which was ours, to work west in Jackson and Lavaca counties.

Our crowd consisted of fifteen men, one hundred head of ponies, mostly wild ones, and a chuck wagon loaded down with coffee, flour, molasses, and salt.

One group sailed from New Orleans aboard a small schooner named the Lively.

They were supposed to meet Austin at the mouth of the Colorado River.

Instead, bad weather blew them off course.

After weeks at sea, they reached the Texas coast and mistook the Brazos River for the Colorado.

Those who did stay discovered that the advertisements couldn't possibly describe everything they were getting themselves into.

The land could be magnificent.

Rich bottomlands stretched along the Brazos and Colorado rivers.

There was timber, grassland, wildlife, and enough acreage to make somebody who had struggled to acquire a small farm back east feel unimaginably wealthy.

I've been to Austin a lot lately.

The Colorado River never gets any attention.

And I saw it like through Austin somewhere and then some other small town.

And I was looking at it and I'm thinking, there ain't a person fishing out there ever.