In 1834 he went as surgeon with an exploring party to Texas and found that country so attractive that after some years further at Columbus he spent the rest of his long life in Texas as a planter, physician and student of natural history.

He died there in 1873 at the age of eighty years.[13] [Footnote 13: F.L.Riley, ed., "The Autobiography of Gideon Lincecum," in the Mississippi Historical Society _Publications_, VIII, 443-519.] The descriptions and advice which prospectors in the west sent home are exemplified in a letter of F.X.Martin, written in New Orleans in 1911, to a friend in eastern North Carolina.

The lands, he said, were the most remunerative in the whole country; a planter near Natchez was earning $270 per hand each year.

The Opelousas and Attakapas districts for sugar, and the Red River bottoms for cotton, he thought, offered the best opportunities because of the cheapness of their lands.

As to the journey from North Carolina, he advised that the start be made about the first of September and the course be laid through Knoxville to Nashville.