At Lockhart, the gathering place for cattle driven up from the brush country of South Texas, she began to keep books for the cattlemen, picking up a trick or two, such as the practice of selling cattle by ”book count”, resulting in a profit for the seller. Years later, she said that she preferred the company of cowmen to that of bankers, and her language, or what is remembered of it, often had the flavor of the range learned from the men who never got beyond the ”flyleaf of a printer”.
During her years as a teacher in Austin, she continued to keep books for her Cattlemen customers and began writing the anonymous fictional stories which Leslie’s weekly magazine published. Such stories as the ”Sister’s Secret”, ”the Haunted House Among the Mountains”, and ”The Lady Inez or the Passion Flower”, ”An American Romance” had a wide readership among the American public, and Lizzie’s income from fiction helped underwrite her first cattle investment. She parlayed $2500 worth of stock in a Chicago cattle company in three years into a 100% profit, then sold her stock for $20,000. With this as a seed money, she began buying both land and cattle, and in 1871 in Travis County recorded her CY brand she bought along with a herd of cattle.
Her life took a pleasant change when she met and married the tall, charming preacher, Hezekiah G Williams, a widower with several children.
The couple married on June 8th, 1879, when Lizzie was thirty six. She must have had some serious misgivings about Hez’s drinking habits and his lack of business sense. Her brother laughingly commented that while the Reverend Williams was preaching his Sunday sermons, his sons were out stealing the congregation’s cattle. Lizzie had enough business sense for both of them and soon came to watch over all her husband’s possessions. When they married, Reverend Williams signed a waiver to any rights to her property, or property she might acquire during their lifetime together.
Hezekiah Williams had dreams of being a colonizer, and when the Hays County Courthouse in San Marcus burned to the ground in 1908, he laid out a proposed new county seat on their land near Driftwood. Although his haze City was near the geographic center of the county and Hezekiah laid off lots named the main streets Johnson and Williams. And built a two story hotel, livery stable and church, few lots were sold and the town he dreamed of never developed.
The couple spent a good deal of time at the ranch, but Lizzie continued her teaching, bookkeeping, and fiction writing, working out of their home on 2nd Street in Austin.
Lizzie had no children and seldom showed interest in any social or cultural life. Her entire time was consumed with her investments, and she gave up teaching to devote her time to business. Her associates were most often the cattlemen with whom she discussed mortgages and interest rates, calves, and range conditions. She earned their respect, and one old time cattleman remembered Lizzie, well, commenting. ”Oh, she was smart, knew new when to buy and when to sell she. Always bought good stock”.
Sometime between 1879 and 1889, the adventurous Lizzie accompanied her cattle up the Chisholm Trail, a unique experience for a woman in the days of cattle drives.
Few women are known to have gone up the trail from Texas, as cattle driving demanded the extreme inhuman endurance, and it was judged by cattlemen and frontier women alike as, ”No place for a lady”. Lizzie and Margaret Borland of Victoria were probably the only two Texas ranch women who owned the herds. They followed up the trail. Lizzie built up her own herds, while Margaret Borland acquired her herds at her husband’s death. Both accompanied their herds in buggies during the heyday of the Texas drives. Lizzie’s family surmised that she was never had a better time in her life, basking in the attention paid her by the cowhands for a ”calico on the trail” was a scarce as a sunflower on a Christmas tree. They lavished her with gifts such as wild fruit, Prairie chicken, and antelopes, tongue, and Lizzie often recounted times when the hands put a rope around her and Ezekiel’s bedroll to keep off the rattlesnake.
