THE AUSTIN PAPERS 957 springs. very healthy-it takes some rough mountain land, wild scenery etc. I intended to keep this place permanently and make a. mountain retreat and a large sheep farm of it. There is sign of minerals on it. Ten leagues of one of the other tracts is on the west o:f Colorado opposite to the above, and runs from Union [Onion] Creek up- surveyed by T. H. Borden. The other 11 League trnct is to be, or has been located by Frank Jackson [Johnson n in the upper colony. I make these memorandums for you in case I,, never return. As to the notes due by the settlers, if I can raise enough out of them to clear off all my debts and pay my expenses so as not to sell any land for those purposes it is as much as I ever expected. The land that Williams and Henry Austin and H. Chrisman have cleared out is not any of it to be collected from them, that is, none of that part- of the payments that is coming to me. If anything is left out of those notes I intended it for a school on my league in Coles settle- ment on the plan of an academy. I have a settlement to make at Bexar with the executor of Snucedo on a/c of fees of the Baron de Bastrop as commissnr and shall owe him considerable on that busines.s I expect. The Hawkins business is all settled and finally done with. I made an arrangement with John Austin and Williams as to the upper colony above the San Antonio road, and what is made out of that colony is to be equally divided between us three. 'Williams is to attend to the business but nothing is to be done contrary to law or to the true interests of the country. That is, there is to be no kind of wild speculation. My object in this is more to have the business attended to and that wilderness country settled than to make a speculation. I think I shall get back in about four months, nnd I hope sooner. And I shall then close all my affairs and settle myself and get a wife and be a farmer. I should like to save and realize enough to found an academy up in Coles settlement and intend to do so if I can, but unless land sells high I shall not have the means. My expenses are so much more than anyone thinks they are and there is so great a sacrifice in the most of the payments that I get from the settlers that I am always hard run and without money or means that cnn be used. I wish you to spare no pains or care in having little Stephen my brother's son well educated. There will be enough out [of] my property to educate him and Guy in the best manner possible. I wish them to have a finished education and to study law so us to take care of the future interests of the family. There are so many sharp- ers in this world that every large family who have much property
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