kindhearted traveler had taken the time to carve the letter “P”
into several of the trees around the spring, but who would know
for sure what that meant? At some point in the early days of
settlement in East Texas, a family of new arrivals camped at the
spring. All drank from it. The next day, unfortunately for them,
everyone who had drunk from the spring got sick and several of
them died. Not long after that, the story went, someone driving
a good-sized herd of cattle watered his beeves at the same
spring. Within hours, all of the cow brutes that had drunk from
its waters lay dead, their bellies soon beginning to bloat. “On
the road leading from Jefferson to Daingerfield there is a
spring known by the old settlers as ‘the poison spring,’” the
Texas Republican reported on June 12, 1852. The newspaper,
reprinting a story that had appeared earlier in the Jefferson
Herald, told the story of the emigrants who had died after
drinkign from the spring “several years ago” as well as the
story of the cattle die-off at