Colonel Lyon’s Letters.
Green Lake, Texas., Sept . 5,1865.—The days drag along slowly enough, but I keep myself in as patient a frame of mind as possible. Coarse food, poorly cooked, and very poor water, is enough to use up almost anybody; so the sick list is very large. Fully one-third are reported sick—none seem to be dangerously so. In other respects our condition is improving. We get better rations and have received clothing.
We are terribly troubled with mosquitoes. They come in myriads and early in the evening drive us under our mosquito-bars.
The weather is generally very hot. Altogether our situation is not pleasant here and I am anxious for the time to come when I can leave. I ride nearly every afternoon to a farm house between two and three miles from here for a drink of water out of a cistern. It is a great luxury. The country is infested with robbers between here and Victoria.
I have sent my last $10 to New Orleans for quinine. It is the only thing to break up the fevers, and it is so long since the regiment was paid that there is no money in the regiment, and while mine lasted it was common property, and a man would be a heathen to not send for the medicine if he had any money. I really needed it myself for comforts, but it may save life.
I sit here in this pestilential country, surrounded with more discomforts and in more real danger than I have been in for a long time, and wait as patently as I can. I should have been glad to have crossed the Gulf before the equinoctial storms, but that seems out of the question now. No signs of being mustered out, or any movement, at present. I command the brigade and Beatty the division.
