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At this point it would be useful to explore the economics of slave-hunting.

Wiki ("Slavery in Texas") has it that 1,000 Texas slaves escaped into Mexico during in the five years running from 1850 through 1855, or about 200 each year. Not unreasonable to guesstimate five times that many total making the attempt, or 1,000 each year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery_in_Texas

Sounds like a lot, but the same source puts the slave population in Texas in 1850 as 58,000 in 1850 and 182,000 in 1860. Ballparking; 1,000 runaways per year adds up to somewhere around 1% of the slave population in any given year making the attempt.

Thomas Porter in his book "The Black Seminoles" puts the value of a "prime field hand" in the 1850's at $1,200 to $1,500. Recall that cattleman John Chisum in that same era paid $1,500 for his attractive teenage houskeeper/concubine.

What the standard fees were for recovery of a runaway I dunno, but I think Olmstead somewhere mentioned $200, the state proposing $500.

Useful at this point too to try and figure just how much $200 in real terms was to a Texan in the 1850's.

Here's an interesting link from a National Bureau of Economic Research giving farm laborers' monthly pay in Texas (see page 453):

http://www.nber.org/chapters/c2486.pdf

$12 per month in 1850 to $16 in 1860. Translating to $136 to $192 per year.

Considering that a sort of minimum wage, in today's terms, based upon a $7.25/hour wage, that would translate to about $300 modern dollars a month or around $15,000 a year.

By that yardstick, the $1,200 to $1,500 value of a slave translates in modern dollars to $94,000 - $117,000. Put in THOSE terms it becomes easy to see why even longtime family slaves, practically family members, might still have to worry about being sold off at any given point in time.

A potential recovery fee of $200 back then (if indeed you could collect it) ballparks in today's dollars at around $16,000. No wonder folks were so active in the recovery of runaways. No wonder either that some folks specialized in slave catching.

Birdwatcher