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Twenty-five years ago, Jerry B. Lincecum, Edward H. Phillips, and
Peggy A. Redshaw published Adventures of a Frontier Naturalist.
Collated from four overlapping memoirs, some not previously
published, Gideon Lincecum's account of his life as Indian trader,
physician, and naturalist is lively and full of insight. Lincecum's
experiences of following the frontier in the early 1800s, all the
way from Georgia to Texas, were not so unusual in themselves, but
the intellect and wit that inform his memoirs make them unique. His
scientific articles and collections of specimens, his
correspondence with leading scientists of the time, and his six
years among the colony of ex-Confederates in Tuxpan, Mexico, offer
a first-hand perspective on that age. Lincecum portrays many
aspects of frontier social life, including marriage and divorce,
slavery, education, religion, the social life of the Choctaws and
Chikasaws, medical controversies, and the building of towns. He
vividly describes the unspoiled flora and fauna of Texas in 1835
and tells tales of hunting deer, bear, turkey, and waterfowl. This
anniversary edition includes a new foreword by Jerry B. Lincecum
and Peggy A. Redshaw, offering their insights into the relevance of
Gideon Lincecum's writings today.
The effects of the Civil War on civilian life in Texas are
powerfully conveyed in the correspondence of Dr. Gideon Lincecum
(1793-1874), a natural scientist and philosopher who moved to Texas
in 1848 with his family of ten children and settled in Washington
County. Having retired from an extensive and lucrative botanical
medical practice in Mississippi, Gideon devoted much of his time in
Texas before the war to studying the natural sciences and carrying
on an extensive correspondence that included Northern scientists
and even Charles Darwin. He used a letterpress to make copies of
almost all of his letters, and these letterpress volumes, totaling
more than a thousand pages, were preserved by one of his daughters.
Gideon's letters provide a rich and detailed account of how one
individual and his large extended family, all of whom were strongly
committed to the Confederacy, kept up with the progress of the
conflict and coped with the multitude of problems it created.
Lincecum's resourcefulness in the face of shortages included
weaving spanish moss into blankets and investigating the
papermaking potential of milkweed. He was always optimistic about
the prospects of the Confederacy and always willing to further the
cause however he could. His dedication to the South often led him
into astonishing diatribes, as when he wrote his son Lysander: "It
would be a gratifying thing to my feelings, to be certified that
every man, woman and child in the bounds of the confederacy had
taken a solemn oath that to die fighting is far preferable to
submission, and so long as they have life and strength to damage a
yankee in any manner or form that they will continue to do so."
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