After another crop,
successful as usual, the family moved back to Georgia and cropped still
another farm. Young Gideon now attended school until his father moved
again, this time southward, for a crop near Eatonton. Gideon then left his
father after a quarrel and spent several years as a clerk in stores here
and there, as a county tax collector and as a farmer, and began to read
medicine in odd moments. He now married, about the beginning of the year
1815, and rejoined his father who was about to cross the Indian country to
settle in Alabama. But they had barely begun this journey when the father,
while tipsy, bought a farm on the Georgia frontier, where the two families
settled and Gideon interspersed deer hunting with his medical reading. Next
spring the cavalcade crossed the five hundred miles of wilderness in six
weeks, and reached the log cabin village of Tuscaloosa, where Gideon built
a house. But provisions were excessively dear, and his hospitality to other
land seekers from Georgia soon consumed his savings. He began whipsawing
lumber, but after disablement from a gunpowder explosion he found lighter
employment in keeping a billiard room. He then set out westward again,
breaking a road for his wagon as he went.
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