rs. Hopkin and his son finally reached there on 7 February, after riding on luggage trains without paying in order to save money. They found work straight away. At the time, McAlester was a settlement of Welsh and English immigrants. Later that month Hopkin and his son also discovered that the Amman Valley was not all that far away:
. . . yr oeddem yn eistedd i lawr yn nhy Mr. Morris, y drws nesaf i'm llety. Daeth dyn tal, lysti i'r ty, a dywedodd Mr. Morris wrtho, dyma Gymro eto, bachgen or Hen Wlad. Gofynodd yntau i mi o ba le yr oeddem yn dyfod, ac atebais mai nid pell o Lanelli, sir Caerfyrddin. Beth yw enw y lle? Dywedais mai Gwauncaegurwen ydoedd. Hopkin, rho dy law. Sut yr wyt er ys Ilawer dydd? Yna dywedais fy mod yn credu fy mod yn adnabod ei lais, ond nas gallaswn ddweyd pwy oedd. Dywedodd John Williams, Glynbeudy, Brynaman, a mawr mor falch oeddem i weled ein gilydd. Y mae John yn gweithio engine Slope No 5 yn y lle hwn, ac yn ddyn parchus gan y cwmni a'r gweithwyr, a chanddo ddigon o arian. 26
[We were sitting in Mr Morris's house, next door to our lodgings. A tall, lusty man came to the house, and Mr Morris said to him, here's another Welshman, a boy from the old country. He [i.e. the newcomer] asked me where I came from, and I said not far from Llanelli, Carmarthenshire. What's the name of the place? I said it was Gwauncaegurwen. Hopkin, give me your hand. How are you this long time? Then I said that I thought I recognised his voice, but couldn't say who he was. He said John Williams, Glynbeudy, Brynaman, and how very pleased we were to see each other. John works in engine Slope No. 5 here, and he is a man respected by the company and the workmen and has plenty of money.]
The meeting with John Williams, and probably the Amman Valley connection, proved to be a very profitable one for the Hopkin family. Williams paid for Margaret Hopkin and the remaining eight children to travel from New Philadelphia to Houston whilst the coal company paid for the journey from there to their new home in McAlester, five hundred miles away from the scene of their earlier disappointments. Williams also loaned them, free of interest, enough money to enable them to establish themselves. And it is at this point, it seems, that Hopkin Hopkin and his family disappear from the written record. Despite numerous efforts, we, the authors, have not been able to discover any references - in either American or Welsh sources - which might give clues as to their subsequent fate.
There is, however, one more Amman Valley link in this remarkable story. Originally Hopkin and his son had planned to go on from Dallas to New Cambria, near Jacksboro, Texas, where other acquaintances of theirs, Morgan and Mary Hughes, had a farm. 27 However, heavy snow near Fort Worth prevented them going any further. The Hughes story, as described by Morgan in a letter dated 30 December 1879, is a startling example of the incredible mobility of some Welsh migrants in nineteenth century America. The letter was originally sent to an old neighbour and friend of theirs, Job Phillips of Cwmaman (d.1922), a shop-keeper and postmaster who was also a bosom friend of Mabon's. Phillips in turn sent Morgan Hughes's letter to Tarian y Gweithiwr, 28 partly to warn intending emigrants that prospects on the other side of the Atlantic were not so rosy after all.
Morgan Hughes was the son of Thomas and Ann Hughes, formerly of Ty'nywern Farm, Glanaman. He appears to have worked in coal mines all over south Wales before he and his wife emigrated to Scranton, Pennsylvania, in the early 1870s. There, Hughes continued his calling for seven years and in 1878, having accumulated enough money, they purchased a farm near Jacksboro, Texas, where the small Welsh settlement of New Cambria was beginning to be established. By 1880, however, although one Welsh resident there believed the place was 'a paradise of a country', 29 for Hughes the venture had not worked out and he was in a desperate position:
Yr wyf mewn tipyn o helbul yn awr beth i wneud; nid oes genyf ddigon o arian i brynu stock, a byd