Magee, Andrew

Mr. Travis is a white man, a renter who has a farm of sixty acres just beyond Mr. Ernest Magee s place. While we were working on the house today, Mr. Travis showed up with four dogs, two hounds, a bitd dog, and a poodle. Mr. Travis has deep set eyes, with an expression almost exactly like the saturnine countenance displayed in the older prints of Andrew Jack-son. His hair was thick and brushy, uncut, with a streak or so of grey. 

Isom stayed there on the place, and he worked on the share. When Hezekiah died he was still living with him. Isom raised Ferdie and Andrew Magee they were just lads of boys when Hezekiah died. They... 

After Isom had raised Hezekiah s children, Andrew Magee told Isom about a quarter section that could be homesteaded, laying right next to Hezekiah s old home place. Andrew put Isom on this land, and he showed him how to prove it, and how to take possession. When he had proved it up, Andrew got one hundred acres, and a fraction, and Isom got sixty acres and a fraction. That is where Isom Wilson raised all of his children, and where he lived until he died, an old man. 

The little shirt tailed boy who came from Virginia before the war was an old man when he died. He had raised eleven children by the time he died, he and Mandy together on the old home place they had got through the help of Andrew Magee. Minnie was the oldest, and after her came Simon, Laura, Cornelia, Ada, Ida, Ella, John, William, Samuel, and Ophelia. All of the children, like their father Isom and their mother Mandy, were real shifty folks, and they married into good families and accumulated. 

Old Isom Wilson, who got his land through the help of Andrew Magee, would never have cursed that range rider nor would his son John. But you can figure it out another way. If there had been no Isom Wilson to get land, or John Wilson to start off with a Httle old mule, a heifer, and a wife, there would have been no Jerome Wilson who could think that he was at home and could ask a white man what he wanted in his stock lot. There might have been a Jerome Wilson, but he wouldn t have had a stock lot, and his landlord would have attended to the dipping of a mule. 

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