Then they set out again for Tennessee; but on the road in South Carolina the wreck of the wagon and its ancient occupant gave abundant excuse for the purchase of a farm there.

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.