The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 68, July 1964 - April, 1965 Page: 5
574 p. : ill., maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Edward Dixon Westfall
He rented two farms at a cost of approximately one hundred
dollars a year. Cotton prices were low in 1886 when:
i took my cotton to San Antonio today and found the market flat
i sold a part of it at eight cents and part at seven and a half
squared things the best i could
bought light and lay down and slept on the proceeds of one
fourth of the monied part of my this years crop sold at a
very low figure
In 1893, Westfall received $ .9o per hundred pounds for cotton.
He sold yearlings at five dollars a head in 1895. In 1886, he men-
tions that he sold his corn at 35 cents a bushel. He also took other
produce, such as sweet potatoes, okra, and peanuts, to market, as
well as turkeys and chickens. His estate was valued at $1o,ooo at
the time of his death in 1897. The land was sold in 1959 for
$70,894.25.
The few references to Westfall in histories of early Texas point
out that he was born in Indiana in 1820o and did not come to
Texas until 1845. He fought in the Mexican War of 1846-1848.
Before he settled down on the Calaveros, he had been a Ranger,
an Indian fighter of renown, and a hunter and guide. A man of
action who loved the woods and solitude, he was typical of the
best who settled the American frontier. Yet this background
scarcely supplies the answer to why he left all he had for a public
library.
The Westfall journals, however, give the answer. He was an
ardent reader, not only of newspapers, but of books. Reading was
as important to him as food. Even at the age of seventy-five, he was
walking the miles into Elmendorf for his newspapers. He read
books such as Charles Dickens' Great Expectations and Nathaniel
Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. He liked travel and adventure
stories and at the age of seventy-three was reading James Fenimore
Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, "for this one of coopers is new
to me [but] i read the most of his books many years ago."
Westfall even read things he disliked.
you might wonder why i read anything i dont like
i always have to read the subgect through before i can tell
whether i dislike it as a whole or in part
He was thus a real philosopher. He often:
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 68, July 1964 - April, 1965, periodical, 1965; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101198/m1/25/: accessed April 27, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.