Trotwood's Monthly, Vol. II, No. 2, May, 1906

By Various

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Title: Trotwood's Monthly, Vol. II, No. 2, May, 1906


Author: Various

Release date: September 10, 2023 [eBook #71611]

Language: English

Original publication: Nashville: The Trotwood Publishing Co, 1905

Credits: hekula03 and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TROTWOOD'S MONTHLY, VOL. II, NO. 2, MAY, 1906 ***

Transcriber’s Note: New original cover art included with this eBook is
granted to the public domain.




                           TROTWOOD’S MONTHLY

          VOL. II.      NASHVILLE, TENN., MAY, 1906.      NO. 2




Contents


    HISTORIC HIGHWAYS OF THE SOUTH             John Trotwood Moore

    MIKE KELLEY                                 Ben McCulloch Hord

    CROP RESIDUE AND ITS BENEFIT TO THE SOIL      William Dennison

    ALFALFA-GROWING IN THE SOUTH                    Joseph E. Wing

    HOW OLD WASH DIED                          John Trotwood Moore

    THE GHOST, CASSANDRA                          Madison Sheppard

    HISTORY OF THE HALS                        John Trotwood Moore

    WITH TROTWOOD

    TROTWOOD’S TRAVELS

    FLORENCE, ALABAMA

Copyright 1906 by Trotwood Publishing Co. All rights reserved. Entered as
second class matter Sept. 8, 1905, at the Postoffice at Nashville, Tenn.,
under the Act of Congress of March 3, 1879.




Historic Highways of the South

PAPER V—THE OLD MILITARY ROAD

BY JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE


The verdict of another century is sure to crystallize in the now growing
belief that the two greatest military geniuses of the first century of
the Republic were both named Jackson—Andrew and Stonewall.

The battles of all other commanders—the slow, ponderous, red-tape,
unimaginative stands and retreats of Washington; the stubborn,
mathematical defenses of the perfectly poised Lee; the ponderous
hammerings of the stoical, machine-made Grant—all these were generals
after a rule and a school. But the two Jacksons were a law unto
themselves. They were comets among fixed stars, meteors in a still
heaven. After the frightful holocausts of the Civil War, everything
before it looks small.

But there are tragedies, even in an ant hill, and the life of the
Republic came nearer going out in the wilderness of 1815 than at Bull
Run, Shiloh or Gettysburg, fifty years later.

As the fighting savior of his country, posterity is ultimately bound
to rank Jackson ahead of Washington; for Jackson finished the War of
Independence, begun in 1776, on the eighth day of January, 1815.

And he finished it forever.

England never considered the matter closed at Yorktown, and when she
marched through the North, burning Washington in wantonness and derision,
knocking her generals about as so many dummies and their soldiers as so
many tenpins, she was thinking of King’s Mountain and Yorktown.

Before Jackson’s day nothing was possible for the young Republic. She was
gagged and bound, lying between England’s devil, on the north and west,
and Spain’s deep, blue sea, on the south.

Since Jackson’s day everything has been possible for her; a century of
progress and peace; the great Republic; the Monroe doctrine; the fighting
prestige that could originate the cheek of a Venezuela bluff, and the
remark the British admiral made to the German admiral at Manila.

The Civil War was a Johnstown flood, that made everything before it
look like the breaking of a mill dam on Coon Creek; but the Civil War
established nothing—literally nothing. Two peoples of the same blood and
ideals had merely theorized themselves apart and into a war brought on by
shadows bent on holding office and hence incapable of telling the truth.
The two things they thought they were fighting to decide are just as
strongly fixed to-day as they then were, to wit: that the town clerk is
still the man to attend to the town pump, and that white is not black and
never will be.

The only thing settled was whether there should be one town pump or
forty-five, and whether it were better for the white to work the black
under a life lease or a yearly one. The ideals, aims, purposes and
principles of the Republic are the same to-day as they were before the
big fight, and that it was a family scrap in which both sides would
quickly double on any meddling intruder was demonstrated to the undoing
of the arrogant Spaniard, who first trampled on the Republic’s ideals
until she got to the fighting point and then foolishly brought on the
war, believing, among other things, that the “Southern Confederacy would
rise again” and help her in the fight.

And the Confederacy arose—at Manila and Santiago.

But so much has happened since Jackson and New Orleans, and so few really
knew on what a narrow thread the life of all American ideals hung in
those gloomy January days of 1815, and so long has it been crowded out
for meaner things that it needs telling again, that the children may know
it. For the grown people of to-day, born under lucky stars, made possible
by the genius of Jackson’s work and the glory of his sacrifices, have
been so busy picking up dollars that they have neglected to look up,
even at the stars. This story is to show them the star.

The gamest thing God ever gave to the human race was Andrew Jackson. I
hesitate, in a brief story like this, to attempt to tell the hardships,
sickness, sufferings, mutiny, bickerings, jealousies, insults, lies,
treacheries, butcheries called battles, and starvations that he overcame
to save his people and his country from Indians, Spain and England,
and the Republic from that spirit of disintegration beginning with the
Hartford Convention and ending with nullification. For be it known to all
men and remembered, not in malice, but in forgiveness, that the first
secession convention that ever assembled to dissolve this Union of States
came together at Hartford, Conn., the very day Jackson was fighting to
the death to save the Union at New Orleans.

[Illustration: The beautiful Horse Shoe Bend (Tohopcka), on the
Tallapoosa River, Alabama—the last stand of the Creek Nation, and where,
in a bloody fight, it was destroyed by Jackson.

(Taken April 9, 1906, for Trotwood’s Monthly by C. W. Thomas, Dadeville,
Ala.)]

And I say, not in malice, for there was in this, as there was in the
other attempts of it in 1861, no question either of right or of wrong.
Nation—Country—Republic—Empire—these are all merely abstract things bound
up in the concrete idea of a home. As long as the home maximizes and the
Nation minimizes, the latter is safe. But when it is reversed, when
doubt and uncertainty and discontent come in, the abstract thing is lost
in the struggle for the concrete. And every home idea has the right to
fight for its existence.

But winning is another thing, and if they fail no man has any license to
whisper traitor.

But for Jackson and the peace brought at Ghent by his destruction of the
most formidable savage allies England ever had, and the menace of the
struggling Republic’s existence; by his prompt unmasking of treacherous
Spain at Pensacola and startling the hitherto unbeaten Briton by knocking
his forts down about his ears at Mobile and sinking their ships in the
bay, Gettysburg would doubtless have been fought a half century earlier,
and in Massachusetts.

Let us see: The War of 1812 was forced on the States intentionally and
with all the emphasis of a bully who meets a timid enemy on the highway
and kicks and cuffs him for pure cussedness. New England was for standing
the kicking so long as her ships and schooners might still traffic in
negro slaves, rum, codfish and castor oil. The war tied up her hulls to
rotting at the wharves.

The war, until Jackson was discovered, had been a farce. From the Great
Lakes to the South the bull-dozing, beef-eating, bloody-shirted Briton
simply walked over the Yankee. “You’ll be setting the dogs on us next,”
said a squad of Yankee soldiers, who staggered into a British camp to
surrender and got cursed for coming.

Not one victory had they won. The British had burned the capital and run
the President out of the back door. They had murdered citizens in the
streets, and so empty was the treasury, and so degraded her credit that
the Secretary of War had to pledge his private credit to get money enough
to send Jackson to New Orleans. There was not money or credit enough left
to buy wood to keep the cadets warm at West Point, and the young soldiers
of the Republic’s future wars had to go into the woods and cut it and
bring it in.

And all the time New England, the head and front of the Republic, sat
sullen, secretly aiding the enemy and watching for a chance to secede.
“Is there a Federalist, a patriot in America,” said the Boston Gazette,
“who conceives it his duty to shed his blood for Bonaparte, for Madison
and Jefferson, and that host of ruffians in Congress who have set their
faces against us for years and spirited up the brutal part of the
populace to destroy us? Not one. Shall we then be held in slavery and
driven to desperate poverty by such a graceless faction? No more taxes
for New England until the administration makes peace.” As if the cuffed
and cudgeled administration was not doing its best, even to parting with
the last raiment on the back of its self-respect!

Since the beginning of things there have been two kinds of great
men—talkers and doers. The former are called orators when they talk so
much and so well that their talk becomes natural.

Clay was a talker—Jackson a doer. There was a time when these two men
ran side by side in the minds and memories of the living public. But
that public is dead now, and they are far apart. Only the doer lives,
as only the doer should live. Talk, since the beginning of time, has
been the cheapest commodity of the human race. “And Moses said unto the
Lord, O my Lord, I am not eloquent.... But I am slow of speech and of
a slow tongue.... And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Moses,
and he said. Is not Aaron the Levite thy brother? I know that he can
speak well.... And he shall be to thee instead of a mouth.” That is the
Biblical precedent for placing the orator over the doer.

Jackson was a Moses, Clay an Aaron. Clay, oily and brainy, and a man who
“can speak well,” was sent over to make peace, with Bayard, and Gallatin,
and Crawford and Adams—all Aarons and orators, and, praise God, all now
dead and fast being forgotten. And they had been in Europe twelve long
months, cooling their heels at the doors of diplomacy, or begging at the
back door of its kitchen for such crumbs as the children might sweep off
for the dogs. And after a while they got a few crumbs—England might be
induced to quit her laying on of the lash if certain things were done to
salve her wounded honor, including the fact that she could still impress
American seaman wherever she could find them, and certain territory
transferred to England, including what is now Wisconsin and Michigan and
parts of Illinois and Indiana. For England of that day was the England of
this day—a bully and a land-grabber.

And then the climax came—Bonaparte went under. Bonaparte, who had kept
England so busy she hadn’t had time to whip us before, now in his fall
unfettered the one thousand warships of Britain that had kept him out of
the Channel and the Mediterranean and the army that later sent him to his
Waterloo, and all these were free to fight the helpless under-dog across
the waters.

And then the Aarons gave it up. One of them, Gallatin, wrote home from
England: “The war is popular here, and that their national pride,
inflated by their last unexpected success, cannot be satisfied without
what they call the chastisement of America, cannot be doubted. They do
not even suspect that we have any just cause of complaint, and consider
us altogether the aggressor and the allies of Bonaparte.”

[Illustration: Lake Tensaw, Ala. Known as the old Boatyard Lake. It was
here that Aaron Burr was landed as he was being conveyed from Washington
to Fort Stoddard, and near where the horrible massacre of Fort Mims
occurred.]

Here is a sample of their contempt and billingsgate from the London Sun,
one of England’s great papers, of September 3, 1814: “The American army
of copper captains and Falstaff recruits defy the pen of satire to paint
them worse than they are—worthless, lying, treacherous, slanderous,
cowardly and vaporing heroes, with boastings in their loud tongues and
terror in their quaking hearts. Were it not that the course of punishment
they are undergoing is necessary to the ends of moral and religious
justice, we declare before our country that we should feel ashamed of
victory over such ignoble foes. The quarrel resembles one between a
gentleman and a chimney sweeper—the former may beat the low scoundrel to
his heart’s contentment, but there is no honor in the exploit, and he is
sure to be covered with the soil and dirt of his ignominious antagonist.
But necessity will sometimes compel us to descend from our station to
chastise a vagabond, and endure the disgrace of a contest in order
to repress, by wholesome correction, the presumptuous insolence and
mischievous designs of the basest assailant.”

And the Times—the so-called thunderer—speaking of President Madison:
“This fellow, notorious for lying, for imposture of all kind, for his
barbarous warfare both in Canada and against the Creek Indians, for
everything, in short, that can debase and degrade a government.”

When word came to Lord Castlereagh of the capture of Washington and the
King of France said he doubted the truth of it, Castlereagh said: “It
is true beyond all question, and I expect that by now most of the large
seaport towns of America are laid in ashes, that we are in possession of
New Orleans and have command of all the waters of the Mississippi and
lakes. So that the Americans are now but little better than prisoners at
large in their own country.”

And that is exactly what might have happened but for one backwoods Moses.
And this Moses—it is ludicrous, even in its tragedy, to think what he was
doing when the event happened that first started him in his fame-crowned
career.

A lank, fiery, swearing, drinking frontier lawyer, and general of
coon-skin militia, sharp and sallow of face, blue of eye, peaked of head,
his hair grizzled and tied with eel-skin, anointed with bear’s oil.
Fighting chickens or duels, running horse races or hounds, buying land
and negroes, standing stallions and for every office worth while, from
Major General to Supreme Judge, and in all of it and every thing, getting
there.

“Getting there” more nearly fitted him in every thing he ever attempted
than any man of his day and generation. No American save Grant, Forrest,
Stonewall Jackson and Roosevelt has ever come anywhere near his record of
accomplishing things, and the latter has never yet had half a chance for
showing what he might do in a pinch.

“Jim,” said one of Old Hickory’s negroes to another, the day after the
old warrior died, “does yo’ think ole Marster has gone to heab’n?”

“Nigger,” said the other one, with becoming scorn, “does you think ole
Marster has gone to de other place?”

“No, no! I don’t think dat—in course ole Marster couldn’t go to hell—he
wus too good an’ kind a man fur dat, an’ too nice a gemman; but I jes’
can’t xackly see how he cu’d go to heab’n. De good Book say you mustn’t
kill an’ you mustn’t cuss, an’ you know ole Marster wus right peart at
both.”

“Nigger,” said the other, with emphasis, “if ole Marster tuk a noshun to
go into heab’n jes’ tell me who gwine ter keep him out—jes tell me!”

Great men are teeth in the cog-wheels of things, and sooner or later the
grooves they were made to fit will come to them.

The opportunity that knocked at Jackson’s door came from the arm of as
gallant an Indian as ever made his word his bond—William Weatherford, the
Red Eagle, war chief of the fighting Creeks.

Years before, a Scotch boy, Lachlan McGillivray, sixteen years old, ran
away from home in a ship bound for Charleston, S. C. He reached there
penniless, joined some Indian traders, and drove their pack horses into
the Creek nation—for a jack knife! He traded this to the Indians for
some deerskins and laid the foundation of a fortune that made him the
greatest man in the Creek Nation and a power that three nations—Spain,
England and America—courted till his death. He married Sehoy Marchand,
a half-breed, sixteen-year-old Indian girl, with the sprightliness of
her French father and the black eyes of her princess mother, Sehoy,
a full-blooded Creek of the tribe of the Wind. Their son, Alexander
McGillivray, though three-quarters white, became the most powerful
and influential Indian of his day. He held his own in diplomacy and
statesmanship with England, France and Spain. He was more than a match
for the feeble government at Washington. His sister, Sehoy McGillivray,
married a Georgian, Charles Weatherford, who lived with the Indians,
owned land by counties, upon it the first race track in Alabama, owned
negroes, thoroughbred horses, sheep and kine, ran the first cotton gin
and held the first place of power among his people.

Weatherford, the Red Eagle, seven-eighths white, was his son, and Sehoy
McGillivray was his mother. In his veins was Scotch, English, French and
she whose family was of the Wind. He was an extraordinary man.

“His bearing,” said Pickett, who knew him well, “was gentlemanly and
dignified. His eyes were large, dark, brilliant and flashing. He was one
of nature’s noblemen—a man of strict honor and unsurpassed courage.”

Tecumseh, the greatest of all Indians, and a general in the English army,
stirred up the Creeks as they were never aroused before. Acting for
England with Spain, holding Florida as a secret and treacherous ally,
he induced Weatherford to lead his Indians against Ft. Mims, in South
Alabama, filled with men, women and children who had fled there for
safety and were guarded by a lot of drunken, bragging American troops.
The tragedy was inevitable, for both Spain and England were behind
the Indians, England offering a reward for every American scalp—man’s
or woman’s or child’s. And when the sun went down on the 30th day of
August, 1813, unless she lied to the Indians, as is likely, she paid for
five hundred and thirty of them.

Money payment for the scalps of helpless women and children! Grand old
England of Shakespeare, Drake and Wellington! Glorious vandals of Ft.
Mims and Washington and New Orleans! When I think of her in those days I
remember only Davy Crockett’s famous toast to her: “The British,” said
old Davy, holding up a horn full of whiskey, “an’ may their ribs make the
gridirons of hell!”

[Illustration: The road to old Fort Mims, as it is to-day.]

But it was not all a one-sided fight—they died game, even the little
children—and the Indians buried six hundred of their warriors among the
potato vines outside the stockade.

Weatherford and Tecumseh sowed the wind. In vain the Red Eagle pleaded
for the lives of the women and children of the fort. For them he almost
lost his own life and with clubs and guns drawn on him was forced to flee
to save his life.

Not knowing this, the Americans marked him for death first and branded
him “the butcher of Ft. Mims.”

Five days after this massacre, which changed the boundaries of the
continent and threw Jackson into an arena calling for every quality of
his grit and brain for years afterwards, Jackson, all unconscious of
this opportunity of his life—for the sweat-covered courier did not reach
Nashville with the news until September 19th—was engaged in a street
fight to a finish with Thomas H. and Jesse Benton—two men who were
afterwards his political champions.

It was a foolish, silly quarrel, more like that of boys than men. Jackson
was drawn into it through the eternal fiber in him that forced him to
make his friend’s quarrel his own. This friend was William Carroll,
afterwards the gallant general who stood by him to a finish at New
Orleans. Both Thomas H. and Jesse Benton were young lawyers living in
Nashville. They were friends of Jackson. Thomas H. at the time was
away in Philadelphia on business of great importance to Jackson. Jesse
possessed much of his brother’s fluency with none of his brains. He was
eccentric and excitable. In a dispute he challenged Captain Carroll. It
was all because some younger officers were jealous of Carroll and wanted
to break his influence with Jackson.

In the duel with Carroll (which was harmless) he involved Jackson, and
it ended in Jackson and the two Bentons fighting, in the streets of
Nashville, a bloody duel, in which Jackson was shot, his arm and shoulder
shattered, and the two Bentons found themselves, one in the bottom of a
cellar, and the other’s life saved by the luckiest chance. Jackson almost
bled to death. It was three weeks before he could leave his bed.

That was September 4, 1813. Even then a horseman was riding day and night
through the wilderness of Alabama with news of the Indian butchery. Even
then the Creeks, victorious and bloodthirsty, had collected an army
greater than any which confronted for years and baffled Miles, Crook,
Custer and Canby, and were marching toward the Tennessee and Georgia
frontiers, with Weatherford, the Invincible, at their head. And Jackson,
the man who was to save them and fight the most brilliant Indian war ever
fought on American soil, maimed, half-dead and soaking mattresses with
his blood.

The news made him forget his wounds and his feuds. Tennessee acted and
placed her treasury and her sons at the service of the man who would
lead them against the Indians. Jackson was in command, but Jackson was
dead—so they said. But when a member of the committee of the Legislature
came to his room and propped him up long enough to hear the committee’s
report, and regrets that he was not able to take the field—“The devil in
hell I can’t!” he shouted, as he got out of bed and began then and there
his campaign against the Creeks. His proclamation followed. Propped up
in bed, he wrote: “The horrid butcheries perpetrated on our defenseless
fellow-citizens near Ft. Stoddard cannot fail to excite in every bosom
a spirit of revenge.... It surely never would be said that the brave
Tennesseeans wanted other inducements than patriotism and humanity to
rush to the aid of our bleeding neighbors and friends and relatives.”

October 4 was the day he designated for the troops to meet at
Fayetteville, Tenn., and on October 4 Jackson was there.

A book might be written on Jackson’s Creek war. The Duke of Wellington
said that if Jackson had done nothing else this war would have ranked him
among the greatest generals.

I cannot accept this as meant literally. But what a record of hardships,
grit, perseverance, gameness, generalship, resourcefulness, agony of
overcoming it is! Just one month from the day of his street duel in
Nashville he rendezvoused his troops at Fayetteville. He could not mount
his horse without help. He could not bear for a coat collar to touch his
shattered shoulder. The least unguarded movement, and a thrill of agony
went through his bloodless frame.

We all remember the lives and years and treasure it took to subdue
even the Sioux of the Northwest. Ask Crook and Miles and also poor
Custer—soldiers all, equipped to a king’s taste and backed by the best
army of Indian fighters the world ever saw—except one, and that one the
smaller army that Jackson had to subdue in a twelve months the most
powerful federation of the most intelligent Indians living.

Jackson marched into their territory October, 1813. By April, 1814, they
were killed or conquered, and those who remained, even their greatest
chief, William Weatherford, were his friends and allies.

[Illustration: Old oak near Fort Mims.]

The infallible proof of a great general is his ability to turn his
conquered foes into friends. This was Alexander’s, Caesar’s, Jackson’s,
and Grant’s decoration. It was lacking in William the Conqueror, in
Wellington, Sherman and Sheridan. From Nashville to Fayetteville is
eighty miles along the old military road, now as prosperous a farming
country as ever an army tramped across. At one o’clock, October 11, a
courier dashed into camp from John Coffee, guarding the frontier at the
Tennessee river, crying that the Creeks were coming. He started back
in five minutes, saying that Jackson was coming instantly. Instantly
was always the better part of his religion. He acted instantly at New
Orleans, and it was all that saved him. And no general, by the record,
who ever lived before or since, save perhaps Stonewall Jackson, would
have done it. Incredulous as it seems, by eight o’clock that same night
these 2,500 Tennesseeans, with their sick and wounded general, had
marched, footing it, thirty-two miles to Huntsville. Thirty-two miles in
less than seven hours!

They crossed the river at Ditto’s Landing, and then began that remarkable
war of the civilized against the barbarian, equaled only when Caesar
marched into the woods of Germany and fought their great Teutonic hordes
from daylight till death.

And the Nervit were not braver than the Creeks under Weatherford, the
Red Eagle. Canby was an Indian fighter, tried and resourceful. He fought
through the Mexican War, on the plains with Albert Sidney Johnston,
through the Civil War, capturing Mobile, and proved to be a hard-fighting
and an iron soldier. But the Modocs butchered him.

Custer—his fate is yet fresh in the minds of the living. In the war
between whites he was the equal of Wheeler. With as many men and far
better equipped than Jackson ever dreamed that men could be, he attacked
a mere handful of Indians compared to the great wilderness of them.
Jackson marched into and conquered, and yet they killed Custer, and every
man of his brave but unthinking force. “Twenty-five hundred men and
thirteen hundred horses on the bluffs of the Tennessee,” writes Parton,
“on the borders of the civilization, about to plunge into pathless
woods and march, no one knew how far, into the fastnesses and secret
retreats of a savage enemy! Such a body will consume ten wagon loads of
provisions every day. For a week’s subsistence they require a thousand
bushels of grain, twenty tons of flesh, a thousand gallons of whisky,
and many hundredweight of miscellaneous stores.” Yet Jackson fed them,
with little aid from any outside source, often eating nothing but parched
acorns himself. His pathetic letters begging, commanding, beseeching
the governors of Tennessee and Georgia for food for his troops are
written with an ink of fire. “There is an enemy I dread more than I do
the hostile Creeks,” he wrote, “and whose power, I am fearful I shall
first be made to feel. I mean that meager monster, famine. I shall leave
this encampment in the morning direct for Ten Islands, and hence with as
little delay as possible to the junction of the Coosa and Tallapoosa, and
yet I have not on hand two days’ supply of breadstuffs.”

Hunger and mutiny—what would Custer and Crook and Canby and Miles have
done had these been added to the Indians? He ate acorns, and with a
single rifle barring the path of his starved and mutining troops, he
literally bluffed and drove them on. Seeing it all clearly now, his
victory over the Indians was the lesser one.

Fighting Indians, fighting mutiny, fighting famine, fighting the terrible
enervating, blood-sucking disease that preyed on his very vitals—this was
the Andrew Jackson in the pitiless forests of that pitiless age, with one
arm in a sling, sallow, bloodless and emaciated, resting his rifle across
his horse’s neck in front of the column of starved and mutinous troops
homeward bound and with eyes blazing, his grizzled hair bristling with
fury, exclaiming: “By the Eternal, I will blow the first damned villain
into eternity that advances another step! I will hold this fort if only
two men will stay with me!”

Here are two pictures of him, then that go into you and stay—one of
his innate tenderness, the other his undying grit. At the battle of
Tallushatchee an Indian mother was found dead with a half-starved babe
at her breast. “Let it die,” said the other squaws; “all its people are
dead. It is the law of our race.” Jackson had it taken to his own tent
and found a little brown sugar to make it a tea. He had it cared for,
took it home, adopted it, raised and educated it. It knew no father or
mother save the conquering Jackson and the good Aunt Rachel.

Imagine Caesar coming out of Gaul with a fair-haired white child in his
tent! This man was greater than Caesar, ay, than ten Caesars.

The other was his grit. Unable to eat what little he had, unable to
sleep, there were times even when he could not sit his horse for the
griping pains of an outraged stomach. Only one thing gave him relief,
and how he discovered it no one ever knew. Down from his horse he would
slide, have a young sapling bent down, and hang over it, head down, till
he deadened the terrible pain. Imagine Alexander’s Greeks marching across
Asia and beholding their god hanging over a young tree, head down, racked
with the pain of a woman.

[Illustration: On Lake Tensaw, near Fort Mims. It was here Jackson camped
on his way to Fort Mims, after the massacre.]

The finish came at Tohopeka (the Horse Shoe) on the banks of the
sweet-running Tallapoosa, as beautiful to-day as then. Never had Indians
fortified before—breastworks invulnerable, with portholes. Behind that,
logs and brushwood, from behind which Indians love to fight, and all
unseen. And the Creek Nation died there almost to a man and a woman.

The scene of the Red Eagle’s surrender is worthy a great artist. In the
forests of Alabama. Sentinels—soldiers. The marquee of General Jackson.
Big Warrior, a scalawag Creek, sunning himself by the door. Riding
through the forest on the same gray, half-thoroughbred horse that leaped
the bluff with him at the Holy Ground the Red Eagle comes to give himself
up, that his starving people might live. Tell me not this was martyrdom
and patriotism of the highest, for well did he know what they thought of
him, “the butcher of Ft. Mims,” and easily could he have escaped and gone
in to the British in Florida, as many of his comrades had done.

But if he had gone who would protect and plead for the starving women and
children? Besides, he had found out the British and the Spaniards, and
he hated their ways. He knew that his life alone would atone for it all,
and so he rode up to surrender and be shot for his people. A deer crosses
his path. He kills it with his rifle and flings it over the pommel of the
saddle. Some sentinels stop him. One points out the General’s tent, but
none suspects it is he, else he had not lived to reach the door.

Astonished, dumbfounded, Big Warrior rubs his eyes and looks. Is he
asleep? Can it be—can it be—

“Ha, Bill Weatherford! Have we got you at last?”

Weatherford looked at him. “You traitor, speak not to me, or I will put a
ball through your heart.”

General Jackson heard, and, furious, stalked out with Hawkins at his
heels. “How dare you, sir, ride up to my tent, having murdered the women
and children of Ft. Mims?”

Soldiers near by sprang up with bitter oaths. Not one but would have
given an arm for the honor of killing him. A dozen guns leap up in
the wild shout and babble for precedence, but Weatherford sits and
calmly looks into their muzzles, while Jackson waves his hand and says:
“Silence, and let him speak!”

“I am not afraid of you, General Jackson—I fear no man, for I am a Creek
warrior. I have nothing to ask for myself. Kill me if you wish. I come
to plead for the women and children starving in the woods. Their fields
are destroyed, their homes gone, their cribs empty. They have nothing to
eat. Send out your men and bring them in. I did all I could to stop the
massacre at Ft. Mims. I am done fighting. My warriors all are killed.
Kill me now, if you wish, but save the remnant of our noble race.”

“Kill him! Kill him!” shouted the soldiers, as their guns came up again.
But as he spoke Jackson had seen and understood. Over the head of the
chief he saw, over the clamoring, cursing troops who begged for his
blood, over the past, over Ft. Mims, over all—to Pensacola—to the British
sheltered there, waiting to march into his land to plunder and burn; to
the Spanish, two-faced and deceitful, urging them on.

Instantly he acted. Instantly his great heart, as true for the truth as
a hound for the trail, saw the nobility of the savage towering above the
littleness and ignominy of the greater race. And there flashed in his
broader vision Pensacola and New Orleans. He turned to his troops: “Who’d
kill so brave a man as this would rob the dead.”

Weatherford then threw his game at his feet. “Take it, my General, for
Weatherford is starving.”

Jackson seized his hand: “No, by God, you come in and eat with me.”

(The next paper will be “The Road to New Orleans.”)




Mike Kelley

BY BEN MCCULLOCH HORD


    NOTE—If anything better than this has ever been written about
    the war I have never seen it. It is worthy of the great
    masters—of Sterne, of Thackery and Dickens. So pleased is
    Trotwood’s with this sketch that we have secured the picture
    of its author, Major Ben M. Hord, one of the best and truest
    of men and beloved by all who know him. Major Hord has held
    many positions of trust and confidence, was a gallant soldier
    in the big unpleasantness and was for a term Commissioner of
    Agriculture for Tennessee. He is still young, and this sketch
    shows he is gifted as a writer. We will publish another story
    from him soon.—Editor.

He was an Irishman by birth, and a blacksmith by trade, but gave up his
bellows and tongs to “follow the feather” of his gallant countryman, Gen.
Pat Cleburne, in the Confederate Army, and became a gunner in a battery.
In many of his characteristics Mike was strikingly like his great
captain. Though possessed of a rich vein of Irish wit and humor he did
not have that volatile, bubbling over-flow of spirits so natural to his
people; on the contrary, he was quiet and retiring in his disposition,
even to apparent timidity. His only form of dissipation was tobacco. I
well remember his dirty little cob pipe, black with age and tobacco, with
a stem not three inches long, of the same color, and from the same causes.

Every old soldier who saw much active service in the field, in thinking
of the close places he has passed through, will recall vividly the
sunburnt face and form of some comrade, friend or acquaintance,
conspicuous for his courage, brave where all were brave, but he the
bravest of them all. In this light dear old lion-hearted Mike always
appears to me, when memory harks back to the stirring scenes of forty odd
years ago. With the courage of a game-cock, the modesty of a woman, and
a sunny temperament, he was indeed a lovable companion, and when by your
side in action, made you feel as if you had two right arms and a double
pair of eyes. It is not, however, to speak of his courage that I write,
but of some ludicrous incidents that happened to him after he “jined the
cavalry.”

[Illustration: BEN M. HORD.]

Mike was torn nearly in two by a canister shot the second day at Shiloh,
while his battery was engaged with one of the enemy’s, and as soon as
he was able to stand the journey, his surgeon sent him to his home in
Helena, Ark., to die, as he thought, but which Mike, with an Irishman’s
perversity, refused to do, and which he explained to me afterwards,
in a half apologetic tone for not doing, that the shot really didn’t
damage his “in’ards.” It, however, incapacitated him for service in the
infantry, and as the Federal forces by that time had the river as far
down as Vicksburg, he could not well get back to his old battery, so he
reluctantly joined the cavalry. I say reluctantly, because while he
knew every bone and nerve in a horse’s foot, and was perfectly at home
when he had that article between his knees tacking on a shoe, put him on
a horse’s back and he was as helpless as a new born babe. I doubt if he
was ever on a horse half a dozen times in his life, until he joined Capt.
Rufe Anderson’s company of scouts of Colonel Dobbins’ regiment, Walker’s
Brigade of Arkansas Cavalry, of which I was also a member at that time.
Seeing him one day, shortly after he had joined, hesitate on the bank
of a little stream, as if debating with himself which would be wiser,
to attempt to ride across or to get down and wade and lead his horse, I
called out to him: “Grip him with your knees, Mike, and your back will
keep dry.”

“Grip him with me knase, is it?” he replied. “Then, be jimminy, I’ll git
down and wade, for it’s myself that’s as bow-legged as a barrel hoop, and
it’s me grub, not me back, I’m afther kaping thry.”

Several months had passed since Mike had joined us and he had improved in
his horsemanship to such an extent that he would even venture sometimes,
when very much aggravated, to punish the “brute of a baste” he was riding
with the spur, instead of dismounting and larruping the horse with a
sprout, as he did at first. But notwithstanding his poor skill as a
rider, Mike’s love of anything that might lead up to a brush with “our
friends, the enemy,” was so strong he was always ready and anxious to go
on our scouting expeditions.

Anderson, the captain of our company, was a superb rider. Having spent
many years of his life on the Texas frontier, he could perform all the
tricks in the saddle so common to the cowboys of the present day, but
rarely ever seen then, such as scooping down and picking up his glove,
hat, or pistol from the ground, with his horse at full speed. The
frequent encounters his company had with the cavalry of the enemy made
him pretty well known and much sought after by them, and through the
citizens they had obtained, not only a good description of him, but also
a thorough knowledge of his dexterity as a rider.

On one occasion our scouts reported a foraging train of the enemy coming
out from Helena escorted by a squadron of cavalry. Weatherly, our first
lieutenant, was in command of our troop that day, Anderson being absent,
and as the old man was of a naturally quarrelsome disposition and never
lost an opportunity to pick a fuss or make a fight, either in or out
of the army, we were soon in the saddle and on our way to strike the
escort of the foragers. We were considerably outnumbered, but Weatherly
thought that if he would dismount part of his men, place them in ambush,
and when they opened fire on the blue-coats, charge with his mounted
men on their rear, the advantage of the surprise would about even the
thing up. So part of us were dismounted, Mike and I of the number, and
placed in a dense thicket not more than twenty paces from the road. The
Federal column soon rode in, and at the word “Fire” the thicket blazed,
and at the same time Weatherly charged, as he thought, on their rear
with his mounted men. A number of men and horses went down under our
fire and the head of the Federal column was thrown into confusion, but
only for a moment, for we had struck the Fifth Kansas, commanded by Maj.
Sam Walker, as good a body of cavalry and as brave an officer as there
was in either army. At command they wheeled and formed, fronting the
thicket, and charged in the face of our second volley. At the same time
a yell, distinctly “Yankee,” and a heavy discharge of carbines farther
down the road to our right, told us as plainly as if we had seen it, that
Weatherly had wedged himself in between the advance guard and main column
of the enemy. At this unexpected turn of affairs, with nothing but our
six-shooters to hold back such odds (we did not have time to reload our
guns), it did not take long to determine what to do. “Fall back to your
horses,” was the order, and we fell.

Mike and I were together. Partly on account of his old wound, but
mostly, I think, on account of his contentious disposition under such
circumstances, he was the poorest runner I ever saw—at least it impressed
me so at the time—and when we reached our horse-holder he was mounted,
the others all gone, and throwing the reins to us he followed in hot
haste. I was in my saddle instantly; Mike was not so fortunate. His
horse, a long, lank old bay, as thin as a fence rail, excited by the
shooting, shouting, and running, was plunging viciously around in the
brush dragging Mike, who was pawing the air with first one foot and then
the other in fruitless efforts to catch the stirrup, at the same time
keeping up a continuous string of comments upon the situation generally,
interspersed with bits of advice to me and curses at his horse, such
as: “Give’m a taste of your shooting, boy,” “Whoa, you d—d old brute of
a baste,” “Look at the blue divils how they swarm,” “What a d—d fool
old Weatherly was,” “Struck’m in the middle,” “Divil take the cavalry
service,” “Whoa, you—”

In the meantime the Federals, finding nothing in front of them, were
coming on as fast as the nature of the ground would admit, firing at
random, for the bushes were so thick they could not see ten feet ahead of
them.

Although expecting to show a clean pair of heels to the enemy, I had
instinctively drawn a fresh pistol from my holster when I mounted, and
according to Mike’s advice was using it to the best advantage I could,
at the same time anxiously watching his circus performance with the
old bay, and inwardly praying that it would come to a speedy close, or
both of us would be either killed or captured, in a half minute more. I
couldn’t leave him under the circumstances, for he had more than once
stood between me and “the other shore,” in places equally as close, and
to desert him now, would look like rank ingratitude and cowardice.

“Turn him loose, Mike, and jump up behind me, it’s our last chance,” I
yelled, and at that instant the front line of the enemy burst through the
thicket into the open woods within thirty steps of us. Bang! bang! bang!
went the carbines. “Halt! halt! surrender! surrender!” they called out. I
wheeled, to pick up Mike, if possible, and take my chances running, just
in time to see his horse lunge forward and he lying like a sack of meal
crosswise in the saddle, with one hand clutching the mane about midway
his horse’s neck. My first impression was that he had been shot, and I
was relieved to see him wiggle his leg over the blanket strapped behind
his saddle, and straighten up. Our horses were going at racing speed and
Mike was doing some wonderful riding. He was bouncing about like a ball,
neither foot in a stirrup, and he showed no partiality for any particular
place to sit. Every time his old horse would make a jump, Mike would
come down on him in a different place—behind the cantle, in the saddle,
over the pommel on his neck, then back again, up one side and down the
other—he literally rode the old bay from his ears to his tail. A fallen
tree was in front of us, both horses took the leap at the same time, and
Mike disappeared on the far side of his old “brute of a baste”—gone this
time, sure, I thought, but the next instant, bare-headed he bounced back
on top again. Our pursuers, not liking to follow us too far in the woods,
fired a parting volley of lead and curses at us and pulled up. A few
hundred yards farther on we run into our scattered squad, that had halted
and reformed.

An hour later, Weatherly having gotten the company together, we were
pegging away at the rear guard of the enemy as they leisurely fell back
into Helena, having sent their well-loaded wagons on in front. I stopped
a moment to get a drink of water at a farm house the enemy had just left.
The old man had a son in our company, and was anxious to hear from him,
and learn something of the skirmish.

“I tell you they came very near getting Captain Anderson,” he said, after
learning that his boy was all right.

“How’s that?” I asked, “Captain Anderson wasn’t in the skirmish at all.”

“Oh, yes he was,” he replied. “That Yankee captain that just left here
told me he rode right up on Anderson. Knew it was him from his riding;
never saw such devilish fine riding in all his life; said Anderson just
played along in front of him, cutting up all kinds of antics on his
horse, and he could have caught him had he not been afraid Anderson was
just trying to decoy him into another ambush.”

I knew at once that Mike’s remarkable performance had been taken for
Anderson’s skill. The story was too good to keep, and no one enjoyed it
more than Captain Anderson. When the boys run it on Mike, however, he
replied:

“It’s all right, me lads, but there’s no danger of any of you blackguards
ever being misthaken for your betthers.”

It was not long after the above episode before Mike had another
opportunity, of which he took advantage, to masquerade as his captain
on horseback. One morning a scout came in and reported a strong body of
Federal cavalry coming out from Helena, on what was known as the “middle
road” to Little Rock, on a scouting expedition; which for the benefit of
the younger generation I will say simply meant they were hunting for a
fight. I remember very distinctly I thought those Western fellows were
exceedingly quarrelsome, and as Mike said, “a meddlesome set of divils,”
in those days, and uncommonly handy with a sabre or six-shooter; but I
have met many of them since then, and together we have imbibed the juices
of the corn and rye, and even of the grape, while talking over old times,
and I have found it simply astonishing how erroneous early impressions
sometimes are.

There were two or three public roads that branched off from this “middle
road” at different points between our camp and where the Federal column
was last seen, and after sending couriers to draw in all of our pickets
and assemble the regiment for action, the Colonel ordered me to take four
or five men, go down and observe the enemy, get their strength, report
from time to time which road they were advancing on, so that he could
place his command and strike them on ground of his own choosing. Mike
went with me; he always did when there were any prospects of fun or a
fight, and while the probabilities were rather slim for either in this
case, for I was instructed to keep myself concealed and after getting the
desired information rejoin the regiment as quickly as possible, Mike took
the chances of something turning up that would give him an opportunity
to “bust a cap at the meddlesome divils,” and asked to be one of the men
to accompany me.

I was perfectly familiar with the country, and taking the little squad
started on an air line through the forest for the point where the first
road branched off, which I hoped to reach before the Federals came up, so
that I could take a position suitable for my purpose and send a man back
with the required information without being seen by them.

A half-hour’s rapid riding through the timber brought us close to the
place where the roads forked and where I intended to take my first look
at the blue-coats. The road here ran through thick woods. I knew I was
close to it, but the undergrowth, through which we were riding, was so
dense I could not see it. I also knew that if the enemy had not already
passed this point, allowing them ordinary marching time, they could not
be far off. Placing the men in line, some ten or fifteen steps apart,
so they would be less likely to attract attention, we rode slowly and
cautiously forward, feeling for the road. I took the place of lookout,
and the men were to stop or move forward according to the motion of
my hand. Mike was next to me on my right, some ten or fifteen steps
away, and while I watched for the enemy, he was to watch me, and when I
signaled him, he was to signal the next man, he the next, etc.

We had gone perhaps fifty or seventy-five yards in this way, when I heard
that dull, rumbling sound familiar to every old cavalryman, that told
me we were in close vicinity of a large body of moving horses. Peering
through the bushes in the direction of the sound, and without turning my
head towards my men, I motioned them to stop. The rumbling noise grew
louder and nearer. For a few seconds my little party were perfectly
quiet, then Mike’s horse grew restless and began to move about. Watching
intently in the direction of the approaching noise and without looking
around, I again motioned Mike to keep quiet, but it did no good. I could
hear him swearing vigorously in a low tone at the old “baste of a brute,”
but it only seemed to make the horse worse; he not only continued to
twist and turn about, but began to sneeze and stamp the ground. At that
instant I saw the advance guard of the Federal column file around a
bend in the road not two hundred yards below us. I could tell from the
direction they were coming, that we were much nearer the road than I had
supposed, and that they would pass dangerously close to where we were
standing; at the same time Mike’s horse began to lunge around, snorting,
sneezing, kicking and keeping up as much racket in the brush as a train
of army wagons, while Mike himself was swearing by note and loud enough
to be heard above it all.

“Here they come, Mike! In the devil’s name keep quiet or they’ll bag
every mother’s son of us,” I said as I turned my face toward him to
see what was the matter. A glance explained it all. The old horse, in
twisting about, had knocked over a rotten stump and uncovered a yellow
jackets’ nest, that held a half bushel, it looked to me, of the maddest
jackets I had ever seen. They had sampled the legs of Mike’s horse
several times, but when they began to swarm up and pop it to him on his
thighs and sides, the old fellow could stand it no longer and bolted
straight forward through the brush, kicking, snorting, squealing like a
mustang, and inside of fifty yards of where we were standing jumped into
the open road.

Mike and his steed were about the busiest pair just then I ever saw; the
old horse was kicking, squealing, stamping, plunging and biting in his
frantic efforts to get rid of his tormentors, while Mike was giving his
whole time, and undivided attention, to swearing and sticking on. He made
no effort to guide him, but by the luckiest chance on earth the horse
turned up the road, instead of down towards the enemy.

It was evidently a startling apparition that thus suddenly appeared in
the road in front of the Federal cavalry, for they came abruptly to a
halt, and for a moment seemed undecided as to what it was, or what to
do, for the old horse had his busiest end towards them and they could
see, what must have appeared to them, a dozen or more horses’ tails
flirting up and down, around and around in the air (for the old brute
was swinging it vigorously and with lightning rapidity), and a countless
number of heels and legs flying out of this cloud of horse hair in all
directions. At the same time a shapeless bundle of something gray, was
bouncing about on top, for Mike in his gymnastic exercise in holding on
assumed many inconceivable attitudes, all of which were enveloped in a
thin yellow cloud that certainly was not dust, and out of which came
curses, groans, squeals, and snorts. The old horse did everything but
lie down to rid himself of the torture. Finally he made up his mind to
run, and such running—a streak of lightning would have been distanced
at the rate he went. He looked as if he was literally flying and would
only touch the earth at intervals long enough to sling his heels out in
vicious kicks, first on one side and then the other. At this part of the
performance Mike would bounce up a frightful distance, but always managed
to come down on the neck, back, or side of his horse. I never in my life
saw such running, and can truthfully say no circus ever gave a greater
variety of styles in riding.

As soon as the horse stretched out into a run, and the enemy could see
what it was in front of them, they unslung their carbines, fired a volley
at Mike and a half dozen or them darted out at full speed after him. As
they passed I heard one fellow call out:

“Look at the damned rebel how he rides, will you?” And a sergeant mounted
on a big gray horse shouted:

“It’s Anderson himself, boys, come on!” and he drove the spurs in the
sides of his horse.

They were too intent on catching, as they thought, the noted captain and
expert rider in front of them, to notice us in the brush, but being quite
familiar with their methods, I was satisfied they would at once throw
out flankers to prevent an ambush, so I moved back promptly to a safe
position, and after following and watching them for several miles, and
getting all the information desired, finally locating them on the proper
road, all of which I reported to the colonel from time to time by sending
a man back, I rejoined the command myself just in time to take a part
in the wind-up of a sharp little fight that was claimed a draw by both
sides. We held the ground, but the enemy was drawing off in good order
down the road they had advanced on. We lost some men and had killed and
captured some of theirs. Amongst the latter I recognized the sergeant,
on the big gray horse, who had been so intent that morning on capturing
Mike, thinking it was Anderson. He was battered up a little, had caught a
pistol ball in his bridle-arm and evidently from the cut on his head had
been knocked off of his big gray in the skirmish by some of our fellows.

Mike and I were standing by while his wounds were being dressed by our
surgeon. He happened to be a countryman of Mike’s, and with that never
failing, but indescribable bond of sympathy that the gallant sons of the
Emerald Isle always have for each other, it matters not under what sky
or flag they meet, they were soon engaged in an animated, but amicable
discussion as to the merits of the two respective armies. With the
truthfulness of a saint depicted on his countenance, Mike made the most
startling and exaggerated statement concerning the strength and resources
of our troops, and turning toward Captain Anderson, who had just walked
up, he said: “I’ll l’ave it to Cap’n Anderson if I’m not right.”

At the mention of Anderson’s name and rank, the prisoner turned quickly
and with much curiosity expressed in his face, critically eyed, over
and over, the light but sinewy figure of the noted captain and skillful
rider. Anderson noticed that he was being closely scrutinized, but
without knowing any special cause therefor, he nodded pleasantly at the
captive trooper and remarked: “That was a pretty sharp rap some of our
fellows gave you over your head, sergeant.”

“Right ye are, Cap’n,” he replied, “but it’s meself that would be afther
takin’ tin times as many, only to have caught ye this mornin’, whin we
chased ye down the road.”

I had not yet mentioned to the captain any of the minor details of my
morning’s work, so he knew nothing of Mike’s adventure with the hornets,
for that worthy gentleman, when he joined the command at the end of his
wild ride, had simply reported that we had met the Yankees unexpectedly
at a bend in the road and they had chased him some distance, but that
I, with the rest of the men, was yet in the brush and would get all of
the information wanted. The other men that I sent in afterwards, had
reported direct to the colonel and were at once sent off by him to hurry
up different detachments consequently, Mike’s last feat in horsemanship
had not yet gained circulation.

Anderson looked at the prisoner when he made the above statement, and
shook his head doubtfully. Mike looked at me and shook his head slyly.

“You are mistaken, my man,” said Anderson. “I admit I have had to show
you my heels occasionally, but it was not on the cards to-day. That don’t
look like it, does it?” he added, as he pointed down the road to the
cloud of dust that marked the retreat of our late adversaries.

The sergeant was not to be denied, however, for he had seen him, as he
thought, with his own eyes and had shot at him; lowering his voice to a
half whisper he said:

“Faith, Cap’n, and it’s no shame to ye that ye run, for didn’t we have
the howl command at our back? But it’s a beautiful rider ye are to be
sure; it’s yourself that can tache the best one that iver sthradled a
horse, and Jim Sullivan would give a month’s pay to see ye do it again
and take a dozen more knocks like this on his head besides.”

Anderson turned to me with a look of bewilderment on his face and asked:
“What is the fellow talking about? What does he mean?”

“Ask Mike,” was all I could say, for I was convulsed with suppressed
laughter. With a sly wink at Anderson and a droll look on his dusty,
smoke-begrimed face, Mike replied:

“To be sure, Cap’n, it was meself that did the thrick on horseback this
mornin’ the fellow is sp’aking of, jist for me own devarsion, and to show
the bloody divils how ye have taught your men to ride as well as fight.”
And he gave another confidential and assuring wink at Anderson.

“Why, of course—certainly, Mike—certainly,” said Anderson, anxious to
confirm any statement Mike would make, but not yet certain of his ground.

“It’s the blissid truth I’m afther tilling ye, Jim Sullivan, if that’s
yer name,” continued Mike, turning to the sergeant, with a face as
serious as a Quaker’s prayer meeting, “whin I say I’m the poorest rider
in the company, bad luck to the old horse for the same, but as ye had the
least bit of a taste this mornin’ of what I can do in the saddle, whin
I’m a mind to, jist scratch yer head and think what the cap’n and the
rest of the boys can do whin they thry.”

The sergeant looked with open-eyed astonishment from Anderson to Mike,
then grasping the latter’s hand with a proud look on his face he said:

“It’s ould Ireland, me lad, that can bate the world. Ye may be a poor
rider in your company, but ye can make the best man in the ould Fifth
(his regiment) ashamed of himself in the saddle, and by the same token
some of’m were rocked, whin babies, in horse troughs for cradles.”

The captain and myself left Mike and his countryman discussing horses and
how to ride them, but we were satisfied Mike would change the subject as
soon as possible, for he knew no more about either than a Digger Indian
does of the Greek alphabet.

It was not long after this before Mike had his “innings” on our friends
in blue, although he did not come out as scathless as in the two scrapes
above mentioned.

Our pickets reported a body of Federal cavalry advancing towards LaGrange
from Helena, on the St. Francis road. Our regiment was badly scattered,
having to picket some twelve or fifteen miles of country, but at the
sounds of “boots and saddle” a hundred and forty or fifty men “fell in,”
and with the colonel at our head we went trotting through LaGrange to
meet the enemy.

Some two or three miles below the little village, the road ran through
one of those large cotton plantations common in that section, with a high
rail fence on either side. In the woods just at the end of this lane
there was a thick, heavy growth of young paw-paws. Dismounting Weatherly,
who had in the meantime been promoted to a captaincy, and thirty-five or
forty of his men, were placed in ambush along the road with instructions
to open fire on the enemy as soon as they came up. The colonel took
the rest of the command, skirted the plantation and came to the lane a
half mile further down and in their rear. We had scarcely reached this
position and formed in the timber before Weatherly’s guns opened. We
swung by fours out into the lane and with a yell went at them under full
speed, Colonel Dobbins and Captain Anderson (the latter’s company being
in front), leading the charge on the right and left of the column. The
road was as open and level as a billiard table, every man was driving the
steel in his horse, and we were going at racing speed. The rear companies
of the Federal squadron promptly wheeled to meet us and poured a steady
fire from their carbines on us as we came up. I happened to be one of
the first fours and was within a few feet of the colonel, when I saw him
glance over his shoulder, slacken his speed somewhat, throw up his hand
and call to Captain Anderson: “Let the men close up!” At the rate we had
been coming, we were necessarily badly strung out, and the Federals were
standing solid across the entire road, not more than seventy-five yards
from us.

I pulled up my horse slightly and had half turned my head to look back,
when, like a red streak, a trooper dashed by me. There was no mistaking
the rider. The reins were flying loose, the old horse’s blood was up, and
so was Mike’s. He couldn’t have stopped him if he would and he wouldn’t
if he could, for “Charge” to Mike meant “go in” whether there was one
man or a thousand at his back. He was unslinging his gun for action as
he passed (a double-barrel shotgun loaded with buck and ball, and, by
the way, the best weapon cavalry could be armed with in those days for
close work). I had only time to notice this before our rear had closed
up and the colonel again gave the order to charge. The delay was only
the fractional part of a second, but Mike was then flying fifty yards
in front of us. I saw two puffs of smoke fly over his shoulder and he
disappeared in the cloud. The next instant we were “mixing with ’em.”
The action was short, sharp and fierce, the Federals using the sabre, we
six-shooters, and was too hot to last long. Their rear gave way, we went
through, joined Weatherly, and never gave them time to reform until they
were driven inside of their lines.

I was hurrying back to the place where I had last seen Mike, when I came
up on our surgeon gouging into a poor fellow after a ball and inquired if
he had found Mike.

“Yes.”

“Dead?”

“No, but wounded and on ahead in an ambulance.”

I didn’t have an opportunity to see him until some time after midnight.
I found him stretched out on some straw, with others, in a barn that had
been converted into a hospital. His head was swathed in bandages and
looked as big as a half bushel. His face was so swollen he could not see,
and the poor fellow was delirious.

From the surgeon I learned that Mike had marched a couple of prisoners
up to him, saying: “Take charge of ’em, Doc,” when he keeled over at his
feet with an empty six-shooter in his hand. An examination showed that
his head had been terribly beaten; the cuts were to the skull in five
different places.

I afterwards learned from Mike, as soon as he was able to crawl out and
suck his cob pipe, that after emptying both barrels of his gun, he did
not have time to draw his pistol before he was wedged in the Federal
column, and clubbing his gun, he was “knocking the spalpeens” right and
left, when some “dirty blackguard” struck him over the head, knocking
him from his horse. In falling he was caught between the horses of a
couple of Federal troopers, his arms pinned to his sides as the horses
were crowded together in the lane, and the last thing he remembered they
were beating a tattoo on his head. When he recovered consciousness he
was lying in the timber and two Federal soldiers were standing close
by, their command gone and they undecided whether to try and escape or
surrender. Mike decided the question for them. Struggling to his feet and
taking a pistol from the ground, having lost his own, doubtless in his
tumble, he promptly ordered them to throw up their hands, which they did,
and were marched back as above stated. Neither Mike nor his prisoners
knew at the time that the pistol he pointed at them was empty.

Mike was a great favorite with the colonel, who, like the rest of us,
would occasionally joke him about his riding. Shortly after the incident
just mentioned Mike was out sunning himself. The colonel passed by and
began to rig him about letting his horse run away in the charge, and
carry him into the Yankee lines. “Run away, is it,” said Mike. “Och,
colonel, now it’s yerself that’s fond of a joke. Whin we swung out in the
lane ’n ye told us to charge, if ye had jist tipped me a wink, and said,
‘Mike, me lad, I don’t mane it, I’m only joking,’ me head would be as
sound this minit as your own.”

The laugh was on the colonel, and he enjoyed it most heartily.

Dear old Mike! He answered the last “roll call” only a few years ago, and
“passed over the river.”

The first time I met him after the war was at the general reunion of the
U. C. V. Association in this city in 1897. I had gone to the headquarters
of the Arkansas veterans looking for him, and learned he was out looking
for me. There were a number of the old company present, and as I stood
chatting with them about the old days, some one remarked, “Yonder comes
Kelley now.” Looking up the street we saw him coming, with his hat off,
mopping the perspiration from his face.

“Let’s see if he will know him, boys,” said one, as they clustered around
me.

“Find him, Mike?” one of them asked, as he came up.

“No, bad luck to it; but I’ve been hot on his thrail these two hours
past, ’n have nearly run the legs uv me off intirely. The little devil is
as hard to catch now as he was thirty years ago, when he was riding that
old gray horse,” he answered, as he threw himself down in the shade with
a grunt of disgust.

There was a general laugh, but my heart was in my throat, and I did not
join in until the others had ceased. In an instant he was on his feet.
“I would know that laugh in a thousand,” he exclaimed, looking eagerly
around. I pushed my way through and stood before him.

The steel-gray eyes I had so often seen flash defiance in the face of
death were dim with tears as his hand clasped mine, and when I felt his
arm around my shoulder, his bearded cheek against mine, there were drops
that were not perspiration falling from my own face.

Maudlin sentiment of two old men, you say? Yes, if you choose to call it
such; but a sentiment formed and welded together over and over and over
again in the fiery crucible of battle and one that death alone can break.




Crop Residue and Its Benefit to the Soil

BY WILLIAM DENNISON, FARGO, N. D.


How varied, great and wonderful are the blessings which a beneficent
Creator showers universally upon this cosmos of ours for the benefit of
mankind, and is it not strange that a majority of us fail to see these
blessings, which are everywhere before our eyes? One of these blessings
which the tillers of the soil are the recipients thereof, and which very
few of them recognize, is the beneficial results derived therefrom. That
is the importance of crop residue as a help in maintaining the fertility
of the soil. Nature is a great economist—she allows nothing to go to
waste. Everything is turned to some account in the grand, economic plan.
Even the stubble which is left after the grain is harvested, there is a
use for it. Yet many of our farmers fail to see it. The farmers in the
great wheat-raising states of the Northwest burn up their straw stacks
when they want to plow the land for another wheat crop. This ought not
to be. Nature has an important use for this crop residue. It ought to be
returned to the land as manure. It was prodigality on their part to have
sold the fertility of their land in the wheat. But it was compounding the
offense when they burned up their crop residue. Because the axiom is,
the more crop, the more crop residue, and the more crop residue the more
dead vegetable matter to be oxidized. But for this wise provision made by
an all-wise Creator, humanity would long since have perished with hunger
from off the face of the earth. We do not wish to give out the impression
that crop residue alone will maintain the fertility of the land, but to
convey the idea of the importance of crop residue as a help in delaying
the period when land which has been under cultivation for years, without
manure (which is the rule in the United States) ceases to be profitable
to cultivate.

“It is a fact both of scientific interest and of great practical
importance, that the enrichment of a soil with nitrogen is confined to
certain limits, which can, with great difficulty, be exceeded. The
limit varies according to the conditions in which the soil is placed. A
familiar instance of the limit is afforded by a pasture.

“We have seen when the arable land is laid down in grass an accumulation
of nitrogen takes place in the surface soil. This accumulation may be
slow or rapid, according to the treatment of the field, but in the case
of an ordinary meadow the accumulation does not pass a certain point.
After a certain number of years no further rise in nitrogen appears in
the soil, although the external conditions of the meadow remain precisely
the same as they were when the former accumulation of nitrogen took
place. The influence of crop residue, Prof. Warington says, “where the
ammonium salts were applied without ash constituents the produce was the
smallest, and so was the nitrogen in the soil, and this nitrogen, like
the crops, was a diminishing quantity. Where superphosphate was supplied
with the ammonia the crop was considerably increased, and so was the
nitrogen of the soil, which has shown little change in sixteen years.
Where the ammonia was used with a full supply of phosphate and potash the
produce was the largest; the nitrogen, too, of the soil was largest, and
shows a tendency to rise.” “We see here at once a relation between the
amount of the crop and the rise or fall of the nitrogen in the soil. The
quantity of nitrogenous matter in a surface soil can only be maintained
when the crop grown on the soil reaches a certain annual amount. There
is, in fact, an annual waste of the nitrogenous capital of the soil, and
if the proportion of the nitrogen of the soil is to be maintained there
must be an equal annual addition of fresh nitrogenous organic matter.
This is furnished to the soil in the form of crop residue, consisting of
dead roots, leaves and stubble of a former crop, and the dead matter of
weeds. When this crop residue is of large amount, as in the cultivation
of red clover or in any case of green manuring, or when smaller residues
are left untouched by the plow and allowed to accumulate, as in the case
of a pasture, the conditions for an increase in the nitrogen of the soil
are present. When, on the other hand, the crop residue is nil, as in
the case of a bare fallow, or very small, as upon unmanured land, there
is either none, or an insufficient replacement of the annual loss of
organic matter in the soil, and the nitrogen of the soil consequently
falls.” “The proportion of nitrogen in a soil can only be maintained when
the supply of ash constituents (phosphates and potash) is sufficient to
furnish the necessary amount of crop and crop residue.”

The nitrogenous organic matter contained in soils is for the most part
an insoluble substance, a fact of the greatest importance for the
maintenance of the fertility of the soil. While in this condition it is
of little use to the higher order of plants among which our ordinary
crops are included. To become available as plant food, it must be
oxidized and rendered soluble, but as soon as this step is effected it
becomes liable to be lost by drainage. Not many years ago we would have
been satisfied in explaining the oxidation which occurs in soil as due
to a simple contact with oxygen. We now take a different view of these
changes. We know that the organic matter of a soil is split up and
oxidized by means of living agents. A fertile soil is, in fact, teeming
with life of many kinds. Many of these living agents are quite invisible
to our eyes, and yet are performing changes on a great scale, upon the
accomplishment of which the growth of our food crops depends.

The living agents which attack the organic matter of soil may be classed
as (1) animal life—worms and insects; (2) fungi; (3) bacteria. The
worms, beetles, larvae, etc., in a surface soil feed on the recently
dead vegetable matter left by the crop or weeds which previously had
possession of the soil. The carbon of this vegetable food is oxidized in
their bodies and exhaled as carbonic acid, while the nitrogen is excreted
in simple forms of combination. The fungi also feed on the nitrogenous
organic matter of soil; carbon is oxidized in their cells and exhaled as
carbonic acid, while their dead nitrogenous tissues restore to the soil a
great part of the nitrogen which they had assimilated.

The conditions which favor the complete oxidation effected by bacteria
are aeration of the soil by tillage, the presence of a suitable amount of
water and of calcium carbonate, and a high temperature.

It has been mentioned above of the natural limits to the accumulation of
nitrogen in the soil. Prof. Warington thinks he can now perceive some of
the causes of such limits.

“The addition of organic matter to a soil either as crop or weed residue,
or as farmyard manure, at once makes that soil a suitable home for the
animal life—the fungi—and the bacteria, whose function it is to reduce
organic matter to the condition of inorganic matter. An increase of
organic plant residue or manure thus creates some of the conditions
favorable to its own destruction. The rate of oxidation in the soil is
now no longer what it was; the oxidizing agents have increased with the
material to be oxidized. If, therefore, a soil is laid down in pasture
or receives an annual dressing of farmyard manure, the nitrogen in that
soil will only increase so long as the annual increment of organic matter
exceeds the annual decrement by oxidation. If this increment is a limited
quantity it will be met before long with an army of destroyers competent
to effect its destruction. The richest soils are thus the most liable to
waste and demand the greatest exercise of the farmer’s skill to preserve
their condition. When the conditions of the soil are changed, when the
pasture is plowed up or the arable land is left without manure, there is
at first a rapid loss of nitrogen, but the rate of loss soon diminishes.
The organic matter most easily attacked has disappeared. The army of
oxidizing organisms has been reduced to starvation. A partial equilibrium
is established when the annual destruction of organic matter amounts to
little more than the annual residue of crop and weeds; but an absolute
equilibrium is reached only when the annual loss by nitrogen is equaled
by the atmospheric supply. In every case nature seeks to establish an
equilibrium.”

For the American farmer to obtain good heavy crops, and consequently,
large crop residues, there is only one way to do it. Invest some money in
ground phosphate rock, and after applying it, plant a legume—cow peas,
red clover, etc., and the investment will pay you the biggest dividend
you ever received in your life.




Alfalfa-Growing in the South

BY JOSEPH E. WING, MECHANICSBURG, OHIO.


[Illustration: JOSEPH E. WING.]

    (Ed. Note—Mr. Joseph E. Wing is regarded as the best authority
    in the United States on Alfalfa. He was born in 1861, took a
    common school education and worked with his father on a stock
    farm. Went to the Rocky Mountains when twenty-five years old,
    and became a cowboy, learning the business thoroughly and
    becoming manager of a large ranch. While in the West he saw
    the wonderful value of the alfalfa plant growing there, and
    determining to grow it in Ohio he came back to that State,
    bought the old home and went to work. He enriched and drained
    the old farm, laying fourteen miles of tile underdrain in
    a 320-acre farm. Last season he grew on that farm 400 tons
    of alfalfa hay. His two brothers, Charles and Willis, are
    partners with him on the farm, and they made last year, besides
    the alfalfa and other products, 50,000 pounds of lamb wool.—Ed.
    Trotwood’s.)

Alfalfa will grow as well in the South, under right conditions, as it
will in any country in the world without irrigation. Alfalfa sown in
the South under wrong conditions will prove a discouraging failure.
So, therefore, it is far from any desire of mine to encourage unwise
experimentation or lead men to make unavailing efforts to grow alfalfa
upon unfit soils or with wrong methods.

Let us consider the few essential things that alfalfa demands. First, a
soil that is not sour.

Next, a soil that is well enough drained so that water does not saturate
it at any time of the year, unless for a day or two following very heavy
rainfalls.

Then a soil that is rich in the mineral elements that go to make plants
grow, phosphorus and potash, and well supplied, too, with nitrogen.

And, to crown all, a soil supplied with abundant vegetable matter or
“humus.”

Given these things, and the South’s sun and skies, alfalfa will grow in
most any part of the South and will yield annually four or five cuttings
a year of the richest forage either to feed green, or to cure into hay.

An acre of proper soil devoted to alfalfa will produce double the total
amount of available food for animals that an acre of corn will, and of
a higher class of nutrients. That is because the alfalfa is so rich in
protein, the muscle and blood-building elements that are so much needed
in a ration for all young animals, for dairy cows or any animals giving
milk to their young.

To prepare an acre of land for alfalfa may in some instances involve
considerable labor and expense. If the work is rightly done it will be
lavishly repaid by the grateful alfalfa plants, and after they have grown
upon the soil for a series of years they will leave it richer than they
found it.

If each farm in the South will grow alfalfa, even if no more than two
or three acres, it will enormously increase its prosperity and wealth.
There are sections of the South where easily there may be developed large
alfalfa fields. There are other sections where to grow alfalfa will
require thought, effort, expense and care. Success when reached will
richly reward all this effort.

It is most unwise to sow alfalfa seed upon unfertile soils or without
right preparation of the soil and attention to a few important details.

Nevertheless, the few things needful, are of easy attainment, for there
is no mystery about alfalfa growing.

Let us take up the essentials of alfalfa growing: first, that the soil
must be sweet.

It is a new thought to Southern farmers, perhaps, that soils are some
times sour. They may be sour upon limestone land, but are more apt to be
sour away from the lime.

If they are water-logged during part of the year, they are most apt to
be sour. This acidity comes probably from the decay within the soil of
vegetable matter, though some soils very deficient in humus are acid.
An evidence of acidity is seen when clovers fail to thrive, and certain
weeds appear in the meadows.

The appearance of “sorrel,” the little red-topped weed that is seen in
so many meadows of recent years, is an indication of acidity. A surer
indication is the gradual disappearance of red clover and the difficulty
experienced in making it grow.

Lime is the cure of acid soils, though drainage is often needed along
with lime. It may be applied to a freshly-plowed surface at the rate of
from one to two tons per acre of air slaked or ground lime, and in some
countries ground limestone is used with good results.

Lime is not itself a fertilizer, but it makes the land sweet so that
clovers may grow and by their presence bring about enrichment of the soil.

Alfalfa is a clover, one of the best, since it is of very long life and
surprising vigor upon proper soil.

The South needs the use of thousands of tons of lime, in connection with
manures. Liming poor soils without manuring may not bring much benefit
since there may be too little plant food even when the soil is sweetened.

The older regions of the world, where advanced agriculture has been
practiced for centuries, use great amounts of lime. The writer has seen
great chalk pits in England whence had been taken thousands of tons of
chalk (a soft limestone) to enrich the adjoining farms.

In some parts of the South, however, where red clover thrives, the land
has in it enough lime, and is in no need of sweetening. We will then
consider the next requirement—drainage.

Alfalfa grows through the aid of little bacteria that inhabit its
rootlets. These bacteria must have air. Therefore the flooding of the
earth by complete saturation of water destroys the life of the bacteria
and of the alfalfa itself.

If a post-hole dug three feet deep in the field where it is desired to
sow alfalfa shows water standing in it for more than a few days in the
year, that soil needs under-draining before being sown to alfalfa.

In general, the depth to the water level should be about forty feet. If
there is a greater depth it is generally better.

Now, we will consider the matter of fertility. Alfalfa feeds deep in the
soil after it gets established and it secures a part of its nitrogen
through the aid of the bacteria from the air.

Nevertheless, it is a gross feeder upon phosphorus and potash and cannot
secure these from the air. Nor will it at first secure all its needed
nitrogen from the air.

Therefore, land destined to be sown to alfalfa should be rich when sown.
If it is not rich it should be made rich before seed is consigned to it.

Next, comes the need of humus in the soil. Now “humus” is simply decayed
vegetable matter, and is best supplied through turning under vegetable
growths such as cowpeas, or through the use of stable manures. Humus in
the soil does several very needed things.

First, it supplies a direct plant food through the nitrogen, phosphorus
and potash that it contains, being especially rich in nitrogen.

Next, in decaying it forms compounds that attack the locked-up mineral
elements of the soil and sets them free to be absorbed by the plants.
Then it absorbs moisture and makes the soil more slow in drying, besides
preventing the close packing that comes with puddling in clay soils
deficient in humus.

And as important as anything, perhaps most important of all, it puts
“life” into the soil. Soils with humus in them are really alive, for the
decaying vegetable matter attracts bacteria of many sorts that in their
life and death and decay form many compounds that the plants can absorb
and thus directly increase fertility and make plants grow.

Good soils are truly “live” soils, filled with legions of microscopic
forms of life, most of it beneficial to the higher orders of growing
plants useful to men.

Poor soils, deficient in humus, cold, puddled clays, are literally “dead”
soils and speak sadly of a dying civilization and decaying people.

Alfalfa, then, revels in a deep, rich, sweet soil. How are we to provide
it in the South?

First, there are many river bottoms that are admirably adapted to
alfalfa, being made up of rich alluvial loams, pervious to air and
moisture, and not holding a surplus of moisture. On these soils alfalfa
usually thrives splendidly.

Next, there are new lands freshly cleared where robber crops have not yet
had time to take out the fertility. Often these newer soils will respond
wonderfully with alfalfa. Some very steep mountain sides are growing
alfalfa finely when sown on freshly-cleared surfaces.

Some lands are naturally fertile enough so that they will, with little
aid, grow alfalfa very well. Nevertheless, even the best of the old
cleared parts need manure before being sown to alfalfa.

We had best admit at the outset that most of the old fields of the South
need enrichment to make them produce good alfalfa. And the best way to
enrich them is with liberal coatings of stable manures.

Few farmers are aware of the great value of manures. They enrich far in
excess of the actual potash phosphorus and nitrogen carried.

Liberal dressings, then, of barnyard manure, applied before it has
leached in rain, is the best preparation for alfalfa sowing.

If one has not enough manure to prepare the soil for ten acres let him
attempt to sow but five. If he can’t manure five let him content himself
with two. Two acres of vigorous alfalfa will yield as much as ten acres
of sickly, thin stuff on unprepared soil.

And the two acres will make forage enough to make a further supply of
manure, so that he can next season enrich added acres and sow them to
alfalfa. But while stable manure is the best thing and really almost
indispensable to success in growing alfalfa upon old Southern fields, it
can be greatly helped by being re-enforced by mineral fertilizers.

“Floats,” or finely-ground phosphatic rock not treated with sulphuric
acid, is a very cheap supply of phosphorus. This phosphorus is not
available when applied to some soils deficient in humus.

But when floats are mixed with stable manure in some way the phosphorus
is made available and the plants can get it. Therefore, the wise farmer
sprinkles his stables with floats which absorb the ammonia and makes the
stable smell sweet, and when the manure is applied its value has been
almost doubled. Stable manure fortified with floats is the thing to apply
to the soil to make alfalfa grow.

This manure may be applied to a preceding crop of corn or tobacco, if it
is applied heavily enough so that there is a large residue left.

Or it may be applied directly before the ground is plowed for alfalfa.
This is a safe way. It may be turned under or harrowed in or disked in or
left to lie on the surface through the winter and the land plowed in the
early spring.

Just get it over the land in any way and as soon as convenient after it
is made; it will do the work.

Apply as much as twenty-five tons to the acre and more if you have it.
This will be a help, but in strong Southern clays there is no need to
fear putting on an abundance; it will not leach away, and the more
humus you get in that soil the better your alfalfa will be. Do not be
discouraged by this information; you can afford to use the manure to
start a crop that maintains itself and makes such a large amount of
forage that will, if fed and the manure saved, in turn enrich yet other
fields for many years.

Late in winter or early in spring the land may be plowed. It should
be broken deep and as soon as the land is ready to work, it should be
harrowed to a good seed bed.

Alfalfa wants a firm seed bed, so that the little rootlets find an
unbroken way down into the moist earth beneath.

At a little later than time for sowing oats, say the last week in March,
after danger of hard freezing is over, sow the seed. A peck of alfalfa
seed, fifteen pounds, is enough to the acre; more is waste. There are in
a bushel 14,448,000 individual alfalfa seeds. To sow fifteen pounds per
acre would put on eighty-three seeds to the square foot. Twelve plants to
the square foot are all that will grow to maturity.

The seed may be sown broadcast and harrowed in. It may be sown broadcast
and covered by drilling in after it a bushel to the acre of spring
barley, an excellent nurse crop. The beardless barley is the best. Or a
half bushel of oats sown on an acre will serve as a nurse crop, only that
in this case the oats must be cut for hay as soon as bloom appears and
before they lodge.

The land after seeding must be left smooth so that the mower may be run
over it close to the ground.

There may be sown fertilizer with the alfalfa to help the manure and it
will probably be well repaid.

After the alfalfa is sown, if the land is very dry and cloddy it should
be rolled. If it is moist, a plank drag should make it smooth and level.

At the time of sowing, if some earth from an old alfalfa field can be
had, it is well to make it fine and sow it over the field at the rate of
about 100 pounds to the acre, or soil on which sweet clover (mellilotus)
has grown. The object of this is to transfer some of the bacteria that
thrive on alfalfa roots to the new field. It is as the housewife puts
yeast in her bread.

However, if the manure has been put into the soil and it is not sour, the
seed itself will carry enough bacteria to shortly innoculate the field.
These bacteria increase very rapidly in soils filled with humus.

A good test of whether a field will grow alfalfa or not is to observe
whether it contains earthworms (fish worms). If it does not the condition
is wrong for alfalfa culture.

After this sowing nothing should be done to the field until the barley is
ripe or the oats in bloom. It may then be cut close to the ground. This
close cutting is good for the young alfalfa, which needs clipping at this
time.

Set the binder then to cut as close as possible, and if it must be cut
high for any reason follow at once with the mower and clip the stubble
close. Then let the alfalfa alone to make a second growth. If there
should come rain it will grow rapidly for about forty-five days or a
little longer. After that it may turn yellow and cease to grow.

That means that rust has struck it. Leaf rust is the pest of alfalfa in
all Eastern States. The remedy for rust is mowing off the stems as close
to the ground as practicable.

If there is enough hay to be worth saving rake it off and cure it.
If weeds are the main growth, allow them to lie and mulch the land,
supposing them not to be thick enough to smother it.

When winter sets in have a growth a foot high standing to protect the
crowns and hold the snow. Do not ever pasture alfalfa the first season.
Do not ever allow stock to tramp over it in cold weather, nor drive
across it with wagons.

Oftentimes the fall is a good time to sow alfalfa in the South. When
there is enough moisture in the land to start it well in August or
September it may succeed well, sown alone. The manner would be to plow a
wheat stubble as soon as possible after harvest, applying a light coat of
manure, and immediately working it down to a good seed bed, using every
care to prevent its drying out.

The way to do this is to have a harrow and roller in the field when the
breaking is done. Let the plows run a quarter of a day and finish out
that half day by rolling and harrowing the ground to bring it to a degree
of fineness that will enable it to hold moisture.

No nurse crop is needed when alfalfa is sown in the fall; it must be
about an inch deep and should not be sown when there is merely a little
moisture in the ground with dry soil beneath, lest it sprout and perish
before rains come.

Weeds will not trouble this fall-sown alfalfa much and it makes four
crops of hay the next year, though not quite so heavy crops as the
spring-sown alfalfa should make.

The time to make alfalfa hay is when it is about half in bloom and before
the leaves have fallen from the stem. That will be about the tenth of
May. Take this first crop off promptly to secure the hay while it is in
its prime and to allow the next crop to come on.

Cure the hay by raking into small windrows while it is yet tough and
cocking in rather tall and slender cocks so that the air may get at the
hay. Do not delay raking until the hay is dry or you will lose many of
the leaves, and they are worth as much, pound for pound, as wheat bran.

The hay may cure in the cocks if the weather is fine, or they may be
opened out and sunned and again piled up and hauled to the barn. When
only a few tons are put together the hay must be pretty dry else it may
mould. When putting many tons in one rick or mow the hay need not be so
well dried, as the heat prevents moulding.

Alfalfa hay will keep well in mow or rick, but when ricked it must be
covered with wild grass, straw or boards, as it will not shed rain well.
There will be four cuttings the second year, and these should be taken
off when the proper stage of growth has been reached, whether the alfalfa
is long or short. When it begins to bloom, the leaves to rust, and buds
appear on the bases of the stems, it must be cut, else it will cease to
grow and no subsequent crop need be looked for.

If, perchance from drought, the second or third crop happens to be very
short, it must be mown off as promptly as though it was a good growth and
then the succeeding crop, should there be rain, may be very much heavier
than the poor one removed. Had it not been cut, however, this good crop
would not have been secured.

On land rightly prepared, with favorable seasons of sufficient rain,
alfalfa in the South may yield as much as six or eight tons to the acre.
A yield of four to five tons may more confidently be expected.

Alfalfa will endure in profitable condition on suitable soils for from
six to twelve years. Grasses encroach upon it and may be destroyed by
disking after the roots are tough enough to endure it. A spike-toothed
harrow to follow the disk will more surely tear out the grass. The harrow
will not injure the alfalfa roots.

When once well established an annual drilling in of liberal amounts of
phosphorus and potash will greatly stimulate growth on most soils and be
repaid several times over in the increased yield.

When it is desired to plow the field it may be turned with a very sharp
plow and strong team and the roots are readily killed when cut off. Any
crop will yield very abundantly after alfalfa, corn and tobacco being
perhaps best suited to follow alfalfa, since small grain may lodge
because of the exceeding richness of the land.

After one or two crops have been taken off of the land it should again be
manured and sown to alfalfa, which will take much more readily and yield
much more abundantly than it did the first sowing.

In conclusion I ask the farmers of the South not to sow alfalfa upon
poor or unprepared soil or in a wrong manner, since by so doing, failure
is almost assured and the whole cause of alfalfa culture will receive
a serious setback. I believe, however, that wherever a man has learned
to grow alfalfa he will rejoice all his days and be the richer, more
intelligent and better man for it and his neighborhood will be helped by
the example of good farming.




How Old Wash Died

BY JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE.


I had not seen the old man for several months, but I supposed he was
still prospering on his little farm, when he walked in the other day
without knocking, took his seat by the fire, and casually remarked that
March was always a bad month on rheumatism.

“Why, how are you, old man?” I said, laying down my pen and seeing him
for the first time. “I haven’t seen you for several months.”

“No, I don’t reck’n you is,” he said quietly, “an’ de reason is, I ain’t
seed myself—I’ve been dead!”

“What!” I exclaimed—“dead—are you joking?”

I looked at him closely, but I saw no evidence of insanity—nothing to
indicate that he had yet reached his dotage. However, I thought it best
to pass him something for his rheumatism. He quaffed it off so naturally
that I knew he was all right and would tell it in his own way.

“Ennything happened ter speak of sense I be’n dead?” he asked,
indifferently enough, as he smacked his lips and wiped them on the back
of his hand.

I was anxious to hear how he had died, but I knew any eagerness on my
part would spoil it all, so I replied:

“Why, no, old man—nothing new. But you have heard of Jupiter Pluvius,
perhaps, and his home above the clouds. Well, he has kept busy this
spring with his watering pot.”

“Heard of ’im?” asked the old man, with a show of wrath—“why, I knowed
’im—he was a blue-gum nigger—that Jupiter was—that c’u’d pick five
hundred pounds o’ cotton in a day, an’ he run off wid my secon’ wife an’
jined de Yankees. But he didn’t lib whar you placed de rickerlicshun ob
his cohabitashun—he libbed up on Bear Creek. No, I got no hard feelin’s
about it—for, onbeknownst to hisse’f he done me a great favor. No, I
ain’t got nothin’ ag’in’ him, nur de Yankees, nur’r.”

“I guess not,” I said, “for since the Spanish war we are all Yankees now.”

“All Yankees now? Jes’ lemme tell you, sonny, dah’s one dat ain’t. No,
suh, I am a S’uthern gemman, an’ I still b’leeves de nigger was made to
belong to somebody dat ’uld feed ’im an’ mek ’im beehave. All Yankees
now? Boss, I sho’ am ’shamed of you! De naixt thing you’ll hab us all
Jews or Japs. Wal, dat’s all right, but I b’leeves I told you ’bout
co’rtin’ dat ’ar widder—”

“You got her, didn’t you?”

“Boss, did you urver kno’ ennybody to go after a widder an’ not get her?
I’ve got jes’ one rule fur co’rtin’—set up close, agree on all p’ints,
an’ dat’ll fetch on love. Never ’spute wid a widder, ’specially ef you’re
c’ortin’ her. Wait twell you’re marri’d an’ den bu’st a wash-bo’rd over
her haid ef she don’t beehave.

“Did you urver notice, boss, how cu-is a widder is about dat ur c’ortin’
bus’ness? So diff’unt frum a gal. Now, when you co’rt a gal, she ain’t
gwine say nuffin’ fur a long time. She let you co’rt her an’ co’rt her,
an’ sum day, when she fin’ she lubs you, she’ll jes’ thro’ her arms
aroun’ you’ neck an’ say, ‘Darlint, I am your’n—take me!’

“But wid a widder, nobody ain’t nurver got one of ’em to say ‘yes’
yit—but dey manage to git dar all de same.

“An’ dat wus de way wid dis heah widder I co’rted. De fus’ night I went
to see her she ’lowed she hated de very groun’ I walked on, yet she
lemme hol’ her han’ all de time. De nex’ night I was wuss’n p’lzen, yet
she lemme squeeze her. De third time I was meaner ’n dog-fennel, yet I
was good enuff to hug her. De nex’ time I cum she ’lowed I wus de mos’
contempt’us, po’ ignoble, bandy-legged has-been dat ever was, an’ stell I
sho’ did kiss her. De las’ night she fix me—I didn’t think she’d hab me
to save my life, an’ like a fool I begged her wuss’n a little weaned calf
beggin’ fur milk. Dat wus jes’ whut she was layin’ fur, an’ so, entirely
onbeknownst to me, she had de preacher wid de license dar hid in de
closet, an’ I sw’ar ter goodness, boss, befo’ de cock crow twice dat ’ar
’oman had marri’d me thrice!

“An’ den I died,” he added solemnly. “Yes, boss, I died dead, too. You
see, it all happen’ at de weddin’ supper. You see, boss, de ole man had
allers been used ter drinkin’ sho’ nuff licker, but dat night dey dose me
up wid a konkoction of pine-top, asserfederty an’ buzzard’s bre’f, an’
fo’ I knowed it I wus dead. Why, boss, dey burried me on de fus’ Sat’d’y
arter de secon’ Sunday in January, an’ I didn’t rise ergin ’twell de
Chusday arter de secon’ Sunday in March, an’ ef dat whiskey hadn’t er bin
es good in its raisin’ grace as ’twas in its fallin’ grace, I’d er bin
dar yit.”

“Would you like to kno’ what a man sees, an’ how he feels arter he’s
dead, boss?”

Would I? I gave the old man another dose of the heaven-brewed to help him
along.

“Wal, hit’s about de cu-isest feelin’ dat eber was felt,” he said, after
awhile. “One minnit you am libin’ an’ de nex’ you am trablin’ ’long de
road to Jurdan, an’ you can’t he’p yo’self to save yo’ life. You can’t
stop, you can’t sot down, you can’t turn back. You jes’ seem to be drawed
along like you was standin’ on a slidin’ sidewalk run on undergroun’
cables. But de road is buterful. Flowers bloom all aroun’ you. Birds
sing in de sunshine on gold trees, an’ fishes swim in lakes of melted
di’monds. Inste’d of bein’ outdoors an’ breathin’ air, you ’peer to be
movin’ along under de bright roof ob a cut-glass house, or in a big
bottle ob rarerfied perfume, wid de sun a blazin’ stopper in de roof.

“I didn’t kno’ whar I wus gwine to, an’ I didn’t keer—all I know’ wus I
wus gwine, thang Gord!

“But, bimeby, everthing stop whar two roads met, an’ I know’d one of ’em
went to heab’n, but I cudn’t say which one to save my life. I got down on
my knees, an’ prayed fur light, but no light cum, an’ ’stid of it I heurd
all de little birds singin’ in de gold trees all aroun’ me:

    “‘If you foller the road of sorrer an’ sin,
    An’ don’t pray fur light in de wurl’ you am in,
    No use fur to pray in de nex’.’

“Dat mos’ par’lyze me, boss, an’ I’d a gi’n ennything ef I hadn’t spent
so much time aroun’ race-tracks whilst I wus alive an’ had spent mo’ of
it lookin’ for dis heah track, an’ tryin’ to fin’ out which road to take.
Dar dey bofe lay, jes’ alike, shinin’ in de glow of eternity. An’ yit de
very silence seem ter speak in thunder-tones, an’ de stillness was louder
dan de noise of battle. It all depended on de path I tuck.

“Bimeby, I thort of Ole Marster’s little boy dat I seed die so long ago,
an’ dat I useter nuss an’ carry in my arms, an’ of all de little chillun
I seed bohn one day, an’ die de nex’, an’ I got down on my knees in de
golden dust ob dat ’ar road an’ I look fur ter see if dar was enny baby
tracks dar, fur I knowed whar de baby tracks wus, dat wus de road dat
leads to heab’n.”

The old man stopped, and I saw him brush away a tear. He had said
something as great as Shakespeare, and I, myself, had to take a turn
around the room to stop before the picture of a little curly-head over
the mantel, and listen again for the prattle of a laughter which began
one spring with a bird’s note and ended with the first snow in a new-made
grave.

When I came back, the old man was laughing. Tears—smiles—twins that dwell
in the secret chambers of the heart, and they join hands so quickly at
times!

“Bimeby,” he went on, “I look up de road, an’ heah cum ole Kunnel
Ketchum, er-splittin’ de dust ob de golden road, an’ a-moppin’ his ole
bald head wid a red bandanna handkerchief, an er-lookin’ es pi’us in
death as he was sancterfied in life. Now, boss, you kno’ de Kunnel was
one ob dese here prayin’ lawyers—dat you kin always safely brand as De
Debbil’s Own—an’ he died jes’ ’fo’ I did, an’ he wus awful smart an’
awful slick, an’ whilst I didn’t hab much idee he knowed enny mo’ ’bout
de road to heab’n dan I did, I was bankin’ on his ’bility to find it out
fust.

“‘Hello, Wash,’ sezee, ‘which way you gwine?’

“Sez I: ‘Kunnel, I’m cogertatin’ on which ob dese heah roads leads to
heab’n.’

“‘Oh,’ sez he, ‘I kin show you which road ter take. I dun bin up dar
an’ file my brief wid Jedge Peter at de gate, but dar wus some leetle
irregularerties in de pleadings, an’ I’ve come back to answer his demur.’

“Den he laugh, an’ say: ‘Wash, de ole feller don’t kno’ a little bit o’
law, an’ hit’s de easiest thing in de wurl’ to wuck him ef you’ll only
do es I say. Now, when I went up an’ presented him my church papers, an’
tole ’im who I wus, deac’n an’ all dat, he ’lowed he nurver had larned
to read English an’ he throwed my papers over a bluff, whar I seed some
smoke risin’ an’ swellin’ sorter like de smoke ob a passin’ freight
engine, an’ den he look at me an’ ax if I wus ridin’ or walkin’? Sez I,
“Sir, I am walkin.” “Dat settles it,” sez he, “nobody erfoot will urver
git in dis gait, and es fur dat artomobeel crowd,” sez he, “dey go on
to hell widout stoppin’, fur dey carry de scent of hell erlong wid ’em,
ennyhow. No, sah, Kunnel,” sez he, “you gotter ride a hoss to git into
heah. We need ’em to pull de cherriots in heaben”—an’ de Kunnel look wise
an’ stroke his chin-whiskers.

“‘Now, Wash,’ he went on, soft-like, ‘I’ve got a plan my color’d frien’
dat ull fix ole Peter an’ let us bofe in. I kno’ de road—I’ve bin dar
befo’, so you be de hoss an’ I’ll be de rider, an’ Peter will throw open
de gate, an’ let us bofe in. Dey’s nuffin’ lak a leetle brains, Wash—a
leetle brains in dis wurl’ an’ de nex’.’

“Wal, boss, dat all look mighty conniv’rous ter me, an’ es I had been all
my life a-totin’ de burdens ob de white man, it ’peered mighty nachul
to keep it up. So I got down on my all-fo’s, de Kunnel he mounted me,
an’ I started up de pike in a jog trot. But I hadn’t gone fur befo’ de
ole Kunnel punch me in de side wid his heels, yanked my mouf nearly off
wid de gallus bridle an’ de shoestring bit he fixed up fur me befo’ he
started, an’ yelled out:

“‘Change dat gait, you ole fool, do you think I would ride into heab’n on
a trottin’ hoss when I c’u’d ride a easy pacer?’

“I seed de pint, an’ shifted.

“‘Ah, dat’s better,’ sez he, ‘an mo’ restful.’

“At de gate Marse Peter stop us, an’ say: ‘Am you ridin’ or walkin’ suh?’

“‘Ridin’ dis time, yo’ Honoh,’ sey de Kunnel.

“‘Good,’ sez Peter, a-glancin’ at me, ‘but I don’t like de looks ob dat
swayback scrub you’re ridin’, so I’ll jes’ let you hitch ’im to de fence,
but you kin walk in!’

“An’ de ole Kunnel, he hitch me to de fence sho’ ’nuff, an’ walked in
widout battin’ his eye or sayin’ much obleeged, an’ dar I wus champin’
a shoestring bit, tied to de fence ob heab’n, wid a gallus line, an’
dodgin’ a hoss-fly es big as a turkey gobbler dat wus buzzin’ aroun’ over
de bluff nigh-by.

“Peter look at me a long time, sorter smilin’ an’ sorter mad, an den he
sez: ‘Thort you’d fool me, did you? Wal, for dis decepshun, I’ll turn you
into a sho’ nuff hoss,’ and befo’ I c’u’d say scat, boss, I wus a black
Hal pacer, wid two white feet, a star, snip, black mane and tail, so
help me Gord, an’ dat ’ar hoss-fly es big es a turkey was buzzin’ aroun’
tryin’ to bore a hole in me.

“Gimme anurver dram, boss.”

I thought he was entitled to it.

“But dat wa’n’t all. F’um dat day on dey didn’t do nuffin’ but use me on
dat road, carryin’ folks up to de gate, but nurver gittin’ in myse’f.
An’ dey wucked me ’twell I almos’ drapped dead ag’in. An’ I carried Jews
an’ Turks an’ Chinese, an’ eb’ry kind o’ man dat urver libbed, ’twell de
golden pike wus a pile ob brass, an’ de sun was a furnace ob fiah, an’ me
de hoss, a-doin’ all de totin’.

“An’ ebry day ole Peter ’u’d lead me to de bluff an’ let me look ober on
de pit down below. An’ dar I seed folks I nurver dreamed ’u’d be dar,
in dis wurl’, an’ I failed ter see udders dat I thort ’u’d be dar on de
hottes’ gridiron. Dar wus heathens a-wonderin’ what it all meant, an’
Christians still ’sputin’ on baptism an’ santerfercashun, an’ ev’ry one
ob ’em, boss, a-holdin’ a fat Afercan heathen ’twixt him an’ de fiah.
Greeks, Turks, niggers, Jews, Spanyards—all dar, boss. Dar wus doctors,
still a-lyin’ an’ lookin’ wise, an’ when de yudders called fur water
de debbil had ’em to dose ’em wid quinine an’ calermel, or cut open
de reel bad men huntin’ fur de ’pendix. Lawyers? Boss, if hell only
had a bookcase an’ a dirty carpet, cuspedores an’ a sweatin’ lot ob
bad-smellin’ jurors, you’d a-thort it wus some ord’nary co’te-house wid a
fiah attachment. In one corner dey had penned off a lot ob ole wimmens,
all talkin’ an’ argyin’ at onct, an’ I ax Peter whut dey wus, an’ he sed
dey wus de muthers ob de wives ob men, an’ dey had to be penned off dar
ter keep ’em frum runnin’ de place an’ bossin’ it deyselves.

“Dey wus all dar, boss—all but de babies, as I wus tellin’ you. Nurver
did I heah de wail ob a little one come up frum de pit, nur de lisp ob
a lullerby turned into moan. Fur de sweetes’ nurse dat eber a baby had,
had sed, whilst He was on earth, ‘De little chillun I’ll take keer of
them’—an’ dey had all gone to Him.

“Day arter day I seed dis; day arter day I carried nations on my back
from de partin ob de two ways to de gate whar Peter stood, ’till I prayed
to die ag’in.

“An’ one day, when I thort I c’u’dn’t stan’ it no longer, dar come along
a smilin’, quiet man, wid a kind look in his eyes. An’ dey tole him to
mount me an’ ride me up to de hill. But he looked me all ober, my puffed
legs an’ sore feet an’ sweat-caked sides an’ drawn flank, an’ he said:
‘No—no—I wouldn’t ride into heab’n on the miz’zry ob a dumb beast.’

“An’ he fotch me some water to squench my thirt, an’ he tuck off de
saddle an’ bathe my back, an’ he led me slowly up de hill. An’ when we
come to de gate, Peter looked at ’im pow’ful ’stonished, an’ sed:

“‘Who am you, suh, dat w’u’d choose ter walk ter heab’n when you mout
ride?’

“An’ den de man look at ’im quiet lak, an’ say, ‘I am nuffin heah, my
Lord, an’ it matters not whut my name am. Call me one dat had no creed,
an’ harmed no man, an’ lubbed all things, Lord, yea, eben de beasts of
de fiel’s an’ de birds ob de air an’ de wurm dat creepeth. An’ so loving
them, I would not ride eben to heaben’s gate on de miz’zry ob enny beast
that Gord has made.’

“An’ den dar cum a burst ob music de lak of which no man eber heurd
befo’, an’ a buterful gate on a ribber I nurver seed befo’ was flung
wide open, an’ a voice sed: ‘Righteousness an’ truth hab met toguther.
Whatsoever you did unto one ob dese you do it also unto me.’

“An’ Peter waved his han’ an’ de man was clothed in white an’ light, an’
went in de glory gate—de onlies’ one ob dem all dat went in, an’ I seed
dat yudder gate dat ole Kunnel Ketchum an’ all went in wusn’t heab’n at
all, but jus a side entrance to hell—an’ es he went in he waved his han’
at me’ an’ sed: ‘Go back ag’in to earth an’ learn to lub all things dat
Gord hes made, an’ yo’ na’bur as yo’se’f,’ an’ befo’ I knowed it I stood
in my grabe-clothes in de woods of Bigby, lookin’ fust at de grabe at my
feet an’ den at de skies above me, an’ wonderin’ whut hed happen sence I
died.”

The queer turn the old man gave to his story set me to thinking, and the
hidden lesson touched me so greatly I could not reply. To throw off its
weirdness, I finally said:

“Well, what had become of the widder?”

“I tole you I wus dead nigh six weeks. My wife, she’d marri’d ag’in,
thank Gord, whilst I wus dead!”




The Ghost, Cassandra

BY J. MADISON SHEPPARD


The servants—overhearing the eager, excited footman’s message to the
young mistress—had gathered hurriedly upon the rear porch to inspect
the new arrival; cook, kitchen-maid, butler, flanked on one side by the
parlor-maids, and on the other by a small errand boy, who peeped in
open-mouthed wonder from beneath the elbow of the waiting footman.

The new arrival was a beautiful white mare. She had quickly thrown her
head upward, and now stood at gaze—regarding them. Alert, ardent, with
a slight distinguishable tremor of expectancy, but no trace of fear in
either posture or regard—merely bright inquiry.

“She was the incarnation of the Arab of romance;” lithe, delicately
tapering limbs, satin skin shimmering in the sunlight, pink nostrils
flaring wide from her quick breath, eyes glowing with intelligence, and,
withal, a thing of beauty, standing, as it were, transfixed in passionate
silence.

When the mistress of the house at last came down the great wide stairway,
the group fell back forming a semi-circle, leaving her face to face with
the bright object of interest.

“So that is the horse,” she said, in faint astonishment, which, however,
grew gradually into an expression of pure admiration and wonder; for the
beauty she beheld was little short of marvelous.

She turned suddenly to the servants with a perplexed gesture. “Is the
brougham at the door?” she asked. The footman signified that it was.
“Tell Thomas to come here.” The coachman a moment later had fixed his
eyes upon the newcomer that had attracted the group. At length, his
decorous gravity gave way to a smile of distinct pleasure, expressive of
the praise that seemed to tremble upon his lips; but, he remained silent,
a martyr to his training, his very features admirably correct.

“Is that a well-bred horse, Thomas?” demanded the young mistress.

“It certainly is, ma’am, if looks count for anything,” replied Thomas.

“Very well bred?”

“I’m sure ma’am, the creature must be perfectly so; I’ve never seen
anything so fine ma’am, ’pon my word,” he continued, the swelled veins of
his forehead betraying his stifled enthusiasm.

“Do you mean by that, Thomas, you have never seen that horse before?”

Thomas hesitated.

“Say what you wish to say, Thomas,” prompted the young mistress, with a
hasty glance at his face.

“Thanky, ma’am. Well, you know, ma’am, that your lawyer, sometime last
fall, had the poor master’s trainer sell off some of the horses from his
stable. I’m sure, ma’am, that this is the one the trainer complained so
much of selling, but Mr. Grannan had offered a big price, and the lawyer
made him sell her.”

She had already stepped forward to caress the eager, gazing animal,
timidly, for she could not resist the earnest, entreating look it
bestowed, but, when Thomas spoke the word “master,” she drew back sharply
and stood motionless.

“Never fear, ma’am,” said the coachman, “she won’t harm, ma’am.”

“So, it’s Mr. Grannan’s horse,” she repeated coldly; and then, hastily
turning, she passed through the house to the front door, which the boy,
anticipating her intention, with much dignity now held open. A moment
later she had descended the steps, and was in her brougham with Thomas
upon the box, and the austere footman gazing expectant at the window.

“To my lawyer’s office,” she said, calmly.


II

“The spring sunshine gilded the tops of the park trees. Here and there
the branches of the tall elms spread their tinted green; while the maples
and chestnuts glowed in almost the full glory of their new leaves.”
Scarlet blossoms, on the otherwise apparently naked shrubs bedded in
the green lawns, facades of the brown stone mansions and glass-fronted
shops, could be seen everywhere, on either side of the drive.

The scenes through which she now passed—looking upon, yet seeing
dimly—aroused within her a miserable consciousness that the memory of her
husband, who had once so much loved these very scenes, had also faded
with the spring gladness into an amazing dimness.

So Grannan had sent her the horse! In the first year of her widowhood she
had, by chance, met Grannan. It was on the occasion of the anniversary
of her twenty-second birthday. She had a relative—an old aunt—who had
visited her from San Francisco. She knew Grannan in her home there,
and, meeting him in the city had invited him to her house to dine. In
the beginning of the second year of her widowhood, Grannan had offered
himself; but, the look that she had then given him, froze the declaration
of love upon his lips, and caused him to feel and know the utter
hopelessness of his offer. She had not seen him since then. And now, just
at the end of the second year of widowhood, he had offered her the gift.

She had, at first, intended to keep it. Her husband had been intensely
devoted to horses, and she, through his influence had cultivated a
fondness she had always had for them, and which had steadily increased;
but, the words of Thomas caused her to dismiss any idea she might have
entertained toward harboring the gift.

The brougham stopped in front of the lawyer’s office. Presently that
gentleman stepped forward and greeted her at the window. He soon verified
the truthfulness of the statement of Thomas concerning the sale, adding
that, despite the vehement protests of the trainer, he had deemed it
unwise to reject the very extraordinary offer of Mr. Grannan.

Mr. Grannan, though, he continued, was known as an exceptionally fine
judge of horses, and enjoyed a most enviable reputation among horsemen
for the prodigious success his skill had achieved for him.

She informed him of her determination now, to absent herself from the
city for perhaps an unusual time, and requested that all necessary
letters of credit should be at once prepared and forwarded to her.

Then, signaling the footman and designating the cathedral, she bade the
attorney adieu.


III

Walter Grannan, who was conversing with some of his fellow-members at the
club, which was situated on a corner near the cathedral, was now coming
hastily forward towards her, just as she had alighted from her brougham
and ordered it not to await her, saying, she would walk home.

“It is very fortunate—at least for me,” he said. “I did so want to see
you.”

“I am going away to-morrow, and—of course it’s about the horse,” she
said, pleasantly.

He smiled as he noted the charm of her face. “I am to hope; then, that
you will accept her?”

“Oh, but I just can’t,” she said, “while I must thank you so much for
asking me.”

In a moment she was sorry almost that she had said it. His expression
touched her; and, though she could not satisfy herself why she should
care—what were the expressions of men’s faces to her?—still, the twit was
there. She felt it keenly as she now gazed steadfastly ahead, as they
walked slowly and silently along in the direction of the marble church.

“I also am decided to go away to-morrow,” she said, at length, in a quiet
tone.

Nothing was said in reply.

The great spire of the cathedral towered above her. The tones of the
organ came throbbing from within. A funeral cortege entered. There was a
coffin, piled high with wreaths of flowers. There the same dread pomp and
circumstance of death that was attendant upon her husband. She shuddered
as she turned aside her head.

Yes! Yes! She would go—go to-morrow. She must go! In her nervousness her
handkerchief dropped from her hand.

As Grannan bent forward to pick it up, he observed a single white
flower that had fallen from the wreaths piled upon the coffin, and
gathered this in his hand also. He started to offer it to her; but,
observing the thoughtful, troubled look upon her face, refrained. They
had now stopped; and, a moment later when in a fit of abstraction
he was attempting to pinion the flower to the lapel of his coat, she
involuntarily seized his hand.

“What is it?” he asked.

Her face crimsoned as she instantly withdrew her hand, and struggled for
composure. “Why—er, it’s bad luck,” she exclaimed.

“What’s bad luck?” asked he, with that peculiar tone of voice indicating
that there was no answer for his query.

“Oh, nothing; silliness, mere nonsense,” she said, betraying signs of
her agitation which Grannan, however, failed to discover. “And now,” she
continued, “I must say good-bye, for you are going away, you say, and I
must thank you, oh, I can’t say how much, for your offer of the beautiful
horse.”

“And, do you really mean that you will not accept my gift?” he said,
slowly.

She bit her lip and bent her eyes downward, while she moved the point of
her shoe restlessly upon the stone paving.

“O, I might manage,” she at length began, hesitatingly, “if only to
gratify your whim, to keep it, for a while; but—”

“You see,” he interrupted, “I wanted you to have something to remind—”

“Good-bye,” she repeated, smiling as she gave him her hand. “So you
really go away to-morrow?”

“At once,” he said, gravely, as he pressed the hand she was now
withdrawing from his own, and turned away.

She paused within the vestibuled entrance of the cathedral in what proved
to be a vain endeavor to calm the turbulency of her feelings. The fingers
of her gloved hand were still deadened by the pressure from which she had
just released them. Her eyes had even mastered her will, and now sought
with the intensity of eagerness, the dim outlines of a figure that was
now lost amid the throng, now faintly visible, with its downcast head and
slowly receding step. At last it vanished.

The unsteady, subdued, solemn tones of the great organ within again
rolled tumultuously upon her. She stood struggling, as it were, with the
overwhelming waves of sound. Both her eyes and memory seemed now to focus
upon a receding past.

The dead face of her husband drifted from out the vacancy, so real that
she started, stopped, then started again, slowly descending the steps.

She turned her face homeward. Unconscious of the tide of restless
passers-by, and of the noise that roared imprisoned by the walls of the
high buildings on either side of the street, she turned abstractedly from
the square, lost in the depths of her meditations.

She was thinking of her husband. Thinking of a day on the race-course;
the day upon which she had first met him. Of how she had then dreamed
of his wonderful personality, and afterwards learned how easily and
completely it had swayed her own. Of how untiring, faultlessly devotional
had been his constant care for her, and of how precisely perfect and
pleasureable had been their married life.

She grew desperate now, and upbraided herself distressingly to think that
already he should have become to her “nothing more vital than a memory.”

Yes, after all, she would go. She would go to the scene where she had
first met him, to San Francisco; her husband’s stable of horses was now
there.

As she entered leisurely the door of her home, and was met by her maid in
the hall, who relieved her of her wraps, she made known her intention of
leaving on the morrow, and gave instructions to her to have everything in
readiness for their departure. She then went from the rear porch of the
house in the direction of the coachman’s quarters, to notify Thomas to
make preparations desired. This, she had persuaded herself, was her real
reason for going to the locality set apart for the horses; but, was it?

No sooner had Thomas been found than the very first question asked him
was pertaining to the welfare of his charge. A few moments later, it was
she who was gently caressing the milk-white, deer-head of the mare, with
her soft hands, now stroking the shiny neck, now encircling it within her
arms, while the warm breath from the pink nostrils fanned at intervals
her fair brow, sending a-whirl some truant lock of her wavy hair.

“Thomas,” she now said, turning a face full of inquiry upon the
coachman, who had stood with a look of amazement, gazing upon the
manifest interest and affection of the young mistress, “what is her name?”

“Well, ma’am,” he replied, assuming the air now of one who feels the
importance of being the proud possessor of some rare bit of information,
“ever since she played in the paddock, three years ago now, by her
mother’s side, and the master would come and take her little head in his
hands, just as you have, ma’am, and pinch her cheeks, and laugh at her
odd pranks, he called her Cassandra.”

“Cassandra!” she repeated. “Then he must have loved her?”

“Oh, indeed he did, ma’am, she was his favorite, and the trainer knew it,
too.”

“Thomas, we start for San Francisco in the morning. You are to go, and
have in your especial care, Cassandra. When you have arrived there
deliver her again into the hands of the trainer, with instructions that
the best of attention be shown her.”

“Thanky, ma’am,” said Thomas. “I’m proud of my charge, ma’am, indeed I
am, for she’s a plum picture.”


IV

Five weeks passed. With her aunt beside her, and with Thomas upon the
box, the mistress was sweeping through a bright avenue in the far Western
city. The sky had forgotten the storm of the day before, and the splendor
of a noonday sun now slept upon its bosom. Nature was smiling, but the
smile was not wholly in accord with the feelings of the mistress. A
restless, fitful mood had settled upon her in the early morning, and she
had ordered the drive, as she now frequently did, to the race course.

Her aunt, strange to say, was not a very garrulous old lady, and the
dark, foreboding thoughts which persistently crept into the mind of the
mistress, so perplexed her that she appeared dull. Since her husband’s
death she had acquired the habit of pursuing at will her train of
thought, and now she could not easily break it, even in the presence of
others. Her thoughts now, as they had been much of late, were associated
with the little “Cassandra.” She was sorely vexed with the chiding she at
times administered to herself for the strong, though, perhaps, strange
attachment she felt to be growing dally within her.

Was she then destined, as the very name would imply, to fall in love with
Cassandra? Was she indeed to be fascinated, lured to what had at first
appeared to her the very shores of sin, “by the light of such wondrous
eyes?” Involuntarily she recalled the words of “Ouida;” “There are no
eyes that speak more truly, none on earth that are so beautiful as the
eyes of the horse—dark as a gazelle’s, soft as a woman’s, brilliant as
stars, a little dreamy and mournful, infinitely caressing when they look
at those they love.”

The carriage stopped. They had reached the stables. Instead of awaiting,
as usual, the appearance of the trainer, she found that she had alighted
and hastily sought the compartment set aside for Cassandra; and, that
it was her glossy, silvery little head, that was now swaying so gently
within her arms. Memory again reverted to her husband. To the time when
his hands fondled the same head, his eyes sparkled at her playful pranks,
his lips uttered the word that had named her.

The voice of the trainer suddenly sounding in her ears startled her and
she turned rather abruptly toward him.

“She’s improving, ma’am,” he said, after his usual salutation, “with
every day. The climate is telling on her, for she leaves a clean trough
now after each meal; and her speed—well, no longer than daylight this
morning she showed her heels for better’n a quarter to some of the very
best ones in the barn, ma’am.”

“But you do not intend to race her, do you?” she exclaimed. “She’s too
pretty and to much of a plaything, I should think, for that?”

“True, she is a beauty, ma’am,” replied the trained, “but as for
plaything”—he laughed aloud at the thought as he muttered brokenly—“well,
if I can get the proper weight on her in that big handicap Saturday,
and the track’s right, she might be about the most playful proposition
these cracks have yet got up against. And then, there ought to be a good
price, too.”

“Oh, but you must not sell her.”

“Sell her! I could have thumped that lawyer for selling her. No, ma’am; I
mean there ought to be heavy odds against her in such company.”

“Thomas tells me that Hildreth won yesterday.”

“So she did, ma’am; but at short price, odds on, a favorite you know.”

“Mr. Grannan, though,” he went on, “so his trainer told me, lost pretty
heavily on his entry. He said he telegraphed him to place ten thousand on
his entry and that he, of course, lost it. Mr. Grannan’s been playing in
tough luck all round, so they say.”

At the mention of Grannan’s name the mistress gave a perceptible start,
a shudder passed over her, and a moment later, with some stifled remarks
she ended the interview, and was moving away in her carriage.

Long after she had retired to her apartments in the home of her aunt, did
she hear the words that had escaped the lips of the trainer, sounding
within her ears. Grannan had had bad luck! The scene in front of the
cathedral was again evolving in her mind. The funeral cortege, the coffin
piled high with the floral wreaths. A sudden trepidation seized upon her.
She had again dropped the handkerchief. She saw the handsome face of the
tall figure beside her bending forward to recover it and then gather the
fatal flower.

Could it be that Grannan’s fate—ill fortune, perhaps ruin—had been sealed
by the fall of a handkerchief, as many another horseman’s had by the fall
of a flag? And that handkerchief dropped by her hand? Could she then be
unwittingly instrumental in the downfall which seemed to threaten him?
The thought distracted her. She arose from her seat and walked the floor
of her room in a fit of petulancy. Her brain teemed with myriad vague
and indescribable fancies. The fingers of her hand grew numb, deadened,
as though she had but withdrawn them from his parting grasp. She saw the
same expression of his face that had touched her, when she had refused
his gift. The look of entreaty in his eyes as he turned away.

“Alas!” she at length exclaimed aloud, muttering to herself strangely in
her bewilderment. “Alas! alas! for the doctrines of pernicious fatalism.
How oft do we entangle ourselves in our own sophisms; and, after all,
what poor strugglers we are in the eternal web of destiny. The devils
must, indeed, oft laugh out at the fool who has boasted wisdom.”


V

Saturday morning dawned. Dashes of sunlight at length began to dart
through the rifts in the lifting clouds. It had rained heavily during the
night, and the mistress, though she had ordered out her carriage for a
drive to the race course, felt that the condition of the track would, no
doubt, preclude the possibility of Cassandra’s start in the handicap. She
remembered that the trainer had said, “if the track’s right.” However,
she must go. The spell, the fascination that drew her thither seemed
irresistible. Her aunt persuaded her to remain for lunch; but one o’clock
found her gazing with intensity into the depths of the bewitching eyes,
while she tenderly stroked the shapely little head that Cassandra had at
sight of her thrust through the doorway of her apartment.

“I was just starting,” said the trainer, who now addressed her, “for a
last inspection of the track before deciding what’s best to do. You know,
ma’am,” he continued, “this is to be a hard-fought race, and while I
believe the little girl”—nodding at Cassandra—“is well conditioned to go
the route of a mile and a quarter, and will stand the punishment, still,
in heavy going the chances are all against her. There’s Helen Orland,”
he went on, “and Empress and Annabel—the track to-day, ma’am’s to their
liking.”

The trainer paused, for he could not help but note unmistakable traces of
disappointment on the face of the mistress.

Indeed, nothing could have more delighted her now than merely the
appearance of her “little pet” upon the track, if only to receive the
words of praise from the spectators she felt sure she would. But, as it
was a matter to be left entirely with the trainer, she now turned towards
him, and handed him a roll of bills from her purse, saying as she did so:
“You are doubtless in need of money for expenses. I shall send Thomas to
you for your final decision.” So saying, she stepped into her carriage,
which moved off in the direction of the clubhouse.

“Gad!” said the trainer. “Five thousand dollars! This reminds me of old
times, when the master was living. Only when he gave me a roll like this
it was with instructions to keep my eyes on ‘Bookies,’ and make them keep
their odds right.”

The crowd had now commenced to flow into the grounds in droves and
bunches. As the mistress, calm and collected, swept down the top balcony
of the clubhouse to a position that commanded a full view of the course,
admiring glances from every direction followed after her. Unattended as
she was, and with manner of complete reserve and composure, she seemed
wholly absorbed with her own thoughts.

Seated in a group just to her left, and but a few feet in front of her
was Colonel Townsend, an old gentleman, with Major Campbell and two
others—evidently horsemen, all earnestly engaged in a discussion of
horses and races in general.

As she sat listening—as she was compelled to do—to some of the
loud-spoken utterances of the group, she surveyed with interest the
crowd below her, which was now growing larger and larger. She chanced to
observe a man and a boy walking slowly along the track over in front of
the stables.

Adjusting her field glasses she saw that it was her trainer and jockey.
They appeared to be examining the track carefully, while the trainer
pointed to a spot along the outside rail. They then disappeared. As they
were leaving the track she could see the trainer shaking his head slowly,
with his eyes bent upon the ground.

The pang of disappointment now rankled within her. She knew that
Cassandra’s start had been discussed and that it was abandoned. She
had never realized till now how thoroughly expectant she had been. Her
thoughts took on the coloring of her insatiate longing with which she
battled. Her mind passed in review all the struggles, all the regrets,
all the vague fancies it had conjured when coupled with the bare name
Cassandra.

“Yet,” thought she, “my husband named her. She was his favorite. Why
shouldn’t she be mine? I could not help my attachment. Besides, I’m sure
it must have grown strong—as it has—on his account. How I had wished to
see her start, wished to hear her beauty praised by others!”

The band in the amphitheatre now struck up a lively air and the
horses entered for the first race passed for review before the judges
preparatory to going to the post. A stranger, who came pressing his way
along the balcony until he had joined the group with Major Campbell,
seated himself and looked intently at a programme he carried in his hand.

“Major,” he asked, “what entry is this in the handicap that I hear them
call ‘the ghost’?”

“Oh,” replied the Major, “that is the little mare ‘Cassandra.’”

At the mention of the name the mistress inclined her ear instantly.
“That’s singular,” continued the stranger. “What’s the significance,
Major—or do you know?”

“Why, that’s the name the boys here at the track gave to her and by which
she is now generally known. You see,” he continued, “her owner, who was
greatly attached to her as a mere weanling, is now dead. Have you never
seen her, sir?”

The stranger shook his head.

“Well, she’s a little marvel of beauty, sir, a perfect dream; milk-white
from tip to tip and as trim and shapely as a gazelle.”

“Does she start this evening?” inquired the stranger.

“Townsend told me but a while ago that he had just heard she would not
start.”

“I’m sorry,” replied the stranger, “but after your description of her,
Major, I think I shall make a special trip to the stable to see her.”

“You knew her owner, did you not?” asked the major.

“I can’t recall him,” said the stranger, thoughtfully.

“Why, he’s been with us often—a jolly good fellow he was, too, full of
life and—”

“Was he married?” interrupted the stranger.

“No—that is, I think not,” said the Major, “for I heard something once to
the effect that he was much in love with Judge Taggart’s daughter. By the
way,” he continued, “that young lady is, I believe, married now.”

“Yes,” replied the stranger. “I knew her—Miss Cassie.”

“They’re off!” came the shout from the crowd below, and instantly there
was a general careening of necks from the balcony. A minute later and the
crowd below surged toward the railing of the track and gathered about the
judges’ stand, as the horses rushed toward the wire.

Then there was a wild commotion, followed later by a general movement in
the direction of the “board pencilers.”

Thus the evening passed on, race by race, with a repetition of the usual
scenes and events, until at last there sounded the bugle call for the
handicap.

There was a distinct bustle and stir now among the expectant throng,
which said plainly that the race of the evening was about to come off.

“Colonel Townsend,” asked the Major, “have you seen Grannan since his
arrival to-day?”

“Yes,” responded the Colonel. “I had a short talk with him this morning.
I’m sorry for Grannan,” he continued, “he has been singularly unlucky of
late, and he says there seems to be no end of it.”

At the mention of the name of Grannan the mistress leaned over and
listened. She had long been sitting motionless, stolid, oblivious to
everything save her thoughts. Some one touched her upon the arm, and
turning sharply, with a startled look in her face, she beheld the
outstretched hand of Thomas, holding a batch of tickets.

“The trainer said, ma’am, to tell you that he just could not help it,
ma’am; when he saw twenty to one posted against Cassandra’s chances,
he made the ‘pencilers’ rub it off, and here, ma’am are the tickets.
Mr. Grannan, he said, had placed a large sum on the Empress,” continued
Thomas, “and that he took the liberty to purchase pools on Cassandra at
the tempting odds.”

She clutched the tickets nervously in her hand and quickly thrust them
into her purse, trembling visibly as she did so.

“Ah,” said Colonel Townsend, “we were speaking of Grannan. There is his
mare now—Empress—out for the handicap. I think, though,” he continued,
“that Helen Orland—Briggs’ mare—is going to have decidedly the best of it
in the going to-day.”

“Well,” said the Major, “I like Rosalind or Houston’s entry—Geraldine.”

“What’s the matter with Annabel?” chimed in the stranger. “There she is
now. She certainly looks a winner, and the distance just suits her.”

A wild cheer now suddenly burst from the crowd as Helen Orland passed
in front of the judges’ stand. She was evidently a favorite with the
spectators, for the cheer was repeated.

“Ho! ho!” shouted the Major. “She is going to start. There comes the
‘little ghost.’”

And simultaneously with his words, a bevy of swipes and stable boys set
up a yell.

“Mother of Moses!” ejaculated the stranger. “Major, but you were right.
She is a dream.”

“Yes, and a beautiful dream at that,” added the Major.

“Evidently she’s no nightmare,” echoed a shrill voice from the crowd.

Poor little Cassandra! She was prancing to the music of the band as
proudly as a queen, tossing her dainty head from side to side as gamely
and defiantly as a sparrow.

The mistress turned with a look, intense in its anxiety, to Thomas, who
was still standing, and thrusting her purse into his hand instructed him
to hurry with it to Mr. Grannan, tell him what the trainer had done and
say to him that as he was Cassandra’s rightful owner she desired him to
do as he wished with purse and contents.

Then lifting her glasses to her eyes with trembling hands, she scanned
eagerly the horses as they gathered at the post. Soon, from sheer
trembling and weakness, her hands dropped into her lap. Now, for the
first time, she beheld Grannan with his back turned toward the track and
searching with an anxious gaze the balcony upon which she was seated.

He raised his glasses to his eyes and began slowly to sweep the crowd. As
he did this her head sank involuntarily upon her breast. The blood rushed
to her face. She was abashed—painfully so. What had she done? Could she
stop Thomas? Would that she had seen him before she had sent Thomas. Yet
he had placed a large sum on Empress. Thomas had said so. What if he
should lose? The thought chilled her. She shuddered violently. He has
already lost heavily. It may ruin him.

“They’re off!” roared the throng, and then came the portentous silence.
She raised her eyes and saw the form of Grannan now facing with earnest
gaze the approaching horses. On they came, as if some terror-inspiring
object had suddenly stampeded them.

“Rosalind a neck, Lucinda a length, Helen Orland a head,” commenced the
song of the “caller,” from below.

Another moment and they were sweeping past the judges’ stand.

The stranger, with a manifest anxiety in the tone of his voice, now
observed that Annabel was lapped on Helen Orland and that Empress had
moved up well to the front. Lucinda, he said, had fallen back.

“The ‘little ghost,’” said the Major eagerly, “keeps well up to the
bunch, but she’s too small, though, too small.”

Around the turn they whirled, till now the “caller” cried out: “At the
half; Rosalind, a neck; Empress, half length; Annabel, a length; Helen
Orland—”

“Rosalind, it seems,” exclaimed the Major, “can’t shake them off. See,
she’s falling back. Empress leads now and both Helen Orland and Annabel
are coming up on her.”

“Look at the ‘little ghost,’” screamed a voice from the crowd as they
were rounding into the stretch.

“Ah, but she’s swerved,” chimed in the stranger, “clear to the rail—too
bad, too bad; she’s out of it now; but see the Empress, how determined
she is. The fight is on now and Annabel and Helen Orland are running as
a team. Look! they’re at her throat on either side.”

“Into the stretch: Empress a head; Annabel, a head; Helen Orland—”

“The Empress will win, sure!” said the Colonel.

“Hold!” shouted the stranger. “Look at that! Look at that! They’ve bumped
into her. She’s off her stride.”

“Annabel wins easy!” now shouted a chorus of voices from below.

“But here! here! Look at the rail—at the rail!” yelled the stranger,
as the crowd below took up the shout and roared: “The Ghost! The Ghost
wins!” “No, it’s Annabel, Annabel!” shouted others, “it’s Annabel!”

And thus they flashed under the wire. The crowd now surged around the
judges’ stand. A living stream poured out from the amphitheater. Hideous
screams and yells rent the very air: “The Ghost!” “Annabel!” “Annabel!”
“The Ghost!” “Annabel!” “Cassandra!” “Annabel!” while burning eyes
strained, eager to catch the number—No. 7. Cassandra had won.

One long, shrill, deafening shriek now pierced the air, then died away,
amidst a rudely descending shower of hats, parasols, and umbrellas. A mad
rush for the “bookies,” and the race was ended.

The mistress still stood peering from the balcony as if paralyzed.
Her eyes, now fixed, stared from features as pale and immovable as if
wrought by the hand of a sculptor. Thomas stood tapping nervously upon
the sleeve of her dress, while his ungovernable heels played a tattoo
upon the sounding floor. He was unheeded. He ventured a more violent tug,
and the shapely figure swung slowly around as though poised on a pivot.
“Cassandra’s won, ma’am!”

Her lips moved, but the words were inaudible. Her eyes turned again, bent
in the direction of the judges’ stand.

“Have the judges said so, Thomas?”

“Her number’s 7, ma’am,” and pointing to where the number hung, he said:
“There’s the number. And here, ma’am,” he continued, gesturing wildly,
“are the tickets. I couldn’t find Mr. Grannan, ma’am, and didn’t know
what to do, so I lit in and pretty nigh backed Miss Cassie off them
boards like I ’lowed Mr. Grannan would have done.”

“We’ll go there at once—to the stables,” said the mistress.

“I’ll fetch the carriage to the side entrance, here, ma’am, if you wish.”

She nodded assent as he hurried away. A familiar voice now caused her to
look up into the face of Grannan.

“I must congratulate you,” he said, as he took her hand, “upon the
victory of little Cassandra, though I must say I never knew her by that
name until now. I was utterly amazed,” he continued, “when I thought I
had recognized her. How delighted I am now to know that she won.”

“I am just going to see Cassandra now; will you go with me?” asked the
mistress.

A little later, when they were driving in the direction of the stables,
she turned to him and said: “I was awfully sorry it had been decided to
start Cassandra, when my coachman told me that you had an entry in the
race. Did she in any way hinder your chances for success?”

“In no way whatever, I can assure you.”

“Did you lose very heavily on Empress?”

“Oh, nothing that I could say would so much exceed my usual losses of
late.”

“Have you ever thought,” she asked, “of the flower that fell from the
bier which you persisted in fastening to the lapel of your coat?”

“Am I to be forever doomed, then, for that one perverse act?” he
exclaimed.

“Oh, I don’t know. I believe, though, there is an old adage which they
say affords some consolation to those who recount their losses.”

“And, pray, what is the adage?”

“Let me see—I think it runs something like this: ‘Unlucky in sport, lucky
in l—’”

The word died upon her lips. It was smothered by a kiss.

There was a low whinny near the window of the carriage now as it stopped,
and little Cassandra was peering eagerly in, from beneath her gray
blanket. The boy led her closer to the window; and, as the mistress
clasped her head in her arms, Grannan clasped the mistress in his.




The History of the Hals

CHAPTER VIII.

By JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE


(NOTE—In the beginning we promised our readers that the History of the
Hals would not be confined entirely to dry statistics, but would include
stories of these horses, and practical information relating to other
horse matters. Hence, these two following papers—Editor)

Editor Trotwood’s:

In reading your very interesting and instructive “History of the Hals”
and your learned dissertation on the difference between the trot and
the pace, I am reminded of one of the most laughable and richest races
I ever saw, and which has never been in print before. Understand that
thirty-three years ago, when this true story happened, we did not know
as much about the difference between the trot and the pace as we do
to-day, and which was so ably illustrated in your preceding chapters.
Very well—now, for the place: An Illinois town near the Indiana line.

Abe Stickney and Bob Langdon, living in adjoining towns, were rival
dealers in road and track horses in a small way. Some time before my
story opens Langdon, by a little shrewd, and, perhaps, not quite fair
dealing, “singed” Abe for a couple of hundred, and the latter was “laying
for him,” as the saying goes. Abe was “game,” and never had uttered a
word of complaint, but had kept up a “deal of thinkin’.” In other words,
to use one from “The Bishop of Cottontown,” he “froze.”

He was over in Indiana one day, and at a county fair saw a horse of the
Blue Bull family, called Hoosier Boy.

In order that your readers may better understand and appreciate this
narrative (for I am sure you know the peculiarities of the Blue Bulls), I
will explain that the Blue Bull family of horses originated in Indiana,
that little was known of the ancestors of the founder of the family, Blue
Bell No. 75, that the name was a combination derived from his peculiar
color, and a nickname bestowed on him by his enemies, who called him
“Prudens Bull,” but he turned out like the “Ugly Duckling,” and surprised
his friends and shamed his enemies by founding a remarkable family, and
at one time, since I can well remember, he was the champion sire of 2:30
speed, some sixty in number. They were nearly all natural pacers, but as
pacers were not popular those days, they were made to trot by the use of
heavy toe-weights.

The horse that Abe saw was taking his morning exercise and was a nice,
smooth-gaited pacer. In the afternoon, to his astonishment, he saw the
same horse win a trotting race in pretty good time. Abe investigated the
matter at once and found that he could buy the horse very reasonably, as
he was not quite sound, and he also learned that not a step would he trot
without toe-weights, but would pace quite fast, though not nearly as fast
as he could trot. The horse was shipped home with a bunch of others he
had bought, and Abe immediately began to lay his plans. He hired a fellow
that he could trust and sent him out to the fair grounds with his horse
and then proceeded to Langdon’s town and communicated to Bob’s friends
that he had a horse that could beat anything in the county. That was
enough, and Bob was looking for Abe and he did not have any trouble to
find him.

“They tell me you have a regular streak o’ greased lightning, Abe?”

“Who in thunder’s been lying to you, Bob. Ain’t got nothing but a cheap
one, but I would bet ten on a little race between Hoozier Boy and Gray
Dan just for fun, might make it twenty the day of race if my horse is all
right.”

The ten was soon posted, and the day set a week later, as Abe was on his
way to Chicago to be gone a week.

Soon after, Langdon, knowing that Abe was away, sent a couple of friends
over to learn all they could about Hoosier Boy. They found the horse in
charge of a very sociable fellow.

Yes, that horse was a pacer, and he “lowed” he could step some. He was
going to train him a little and they could see him step if they would
stay.

So out came Hoosier Boy, and they saw him work a mile, and there was no
mistake.

Abe’s man certainly was busy for his orders were that there might be a
buyer there while he was gone, and to show him the very best mile he
could.

Bob’s friends timed him very carefully, and went home delighted. Gray Dan
could beat that time by eight seconds or more. That man of Abe’s was so
obliging, too, and they gave him a nice tip, and asked him as a special
favor not to mention their visit, as they wanted to buy the horse as
cheap as possible.

The race day came and found Abe gloriously drunk. ’Twas not a common
thing, but it seemed to always happen when there was important business
on hand.

“I ain’t got much money,” said Abe, “but, by gol, I’ll bet that lower
eighty of mine agin a thousand dollars—never did like that farm—lost the
best cow I ever owned in that pesky swamp.”

Abe had plenty of friends, and they gathered round trying every way
to prevent his losing that farm. They knew him for a man that never
whimpered when he lost his money, and Bob Langdon was a “sharper.”

“Skin ye, sure, Abe,” they said. But Abe turned a deaf ear to their
entreaties.

“I’m runnin’ my own business. ’G’lang’ away and let me be.” And the money
was soon up, and the farm, too, and they repaired to the fair grounds
for the race. When they arrived they found that very “accommodating
fellow” getting Hoosier Boy ready for the race. A good-sized chunk of
lead adorned the toes of his front feet, but as Bob and his friends never
noticed it, and even if they had would never have minded it, since the
greatest of pacers often wear toe-weights, they only nudged each other
and prepared to soak it to poor Abe the harder.

As usual, Abe was drunk—or appeared so—and, much to the disgust of his
friends, staggered around trying to get up more bets on Hoosier Boy. Then
his friends begged, expostulated. They even threatened to take him home
forcefully and declare the race off because one of the parties was too
drunk to have justice done him. But Abe dodged them and claimed police
protection from the crowd who were backing Gray Dan and preparing to rob
him on a dead certainty.

Finally, they sent for Abe’s wife to come and save her husband’s
“lower eighty.” But the good lady only told them to attend to their
own business, and that Abe never was as drunk as he seemed, and while
they were gone Abe managed to borrow a thousand more by giving a bill
of sale, if he lost, on Hoosier Boy and twenty head of steers he had!
Then, to their disgust, he did more—he put up his homestead against
another thousand on the ground that he wanted to lose it, because his
mother-in-law always stayed there. As this was all in the world he
had—the eighty acres, the steers and the horse, and the homestead—and the
Gray Dan crowd could find no one else who would put up at any odds, they
called for the race and sat down to enjoy the fun.

The horses came out and scored for the race, and still the Gray Dan crowd
suspected nothing. It was dead easy. Hadn’t they seen Hoosier Boy do his
best, and paced in 2:24, and couldn’t Gray Dan pace in 2:16 or better?

“Po’r Abe,” said all of Abe’s friends, as they got behind fences and
posts to keep from seeing the robbery.

On the second score they got away—at least, Hoosier Boy did—so far away
from Gray Dan that he was at the half before the Gray Dan crowd saw that
he was not pacing at all, but trotting to beat the band.

He finished the mile in 2:13. They forgot to time Gray Dan, who was so
far behind.

Bob and his crowd fell off their perch in disgust and left their money
with the stake-holder. Abe still owns the lower eighty, and sundry
citizens of that locality have resolved that whenever they bet again how
fast a horse can go, they will stipulate whether it be trot or pace.

                                                             M. R. HIGBEE.


The Truth About Horseshoeing.

Editor Trotwood’s:

In a foot-note to my article in your February number, you said, “We will
gladly publish your ideas on horseshoeing,” thus letting the bars down,
knowing, perhaps, that I would be liable to wander in.

If I could turn backward in my career twenty or thirty years, I would
undertake the task with more confidence in my ability to furnish
something worthy of a place in your columns. I was young in the business
then. I had finished my apprenticeship, and felt sure that the few things
I did not know relative to the farrier’s art were not worth considering.
Since then, I have been a regular attendant in the great free school of
experience, taught by that merciless teacher, Necessity, and while I have
been fairly successful in trying to furnish unnatural protection to that
part of the horse which comes in contact with the earth, I am still in
need of the necessary amount of conceit that would enable me to pose as a
teacher.

I trust you will allow me to ramble around back and forth between the
horseshoer and the horse-owner (one as much to blame as the other when
the “family pet” goes lame), and I feel confident of being able to
benefit some one, or his poor old overfed horse.

To the uninitiated who read the average writer’s suggestions on
horseshoeing, it would appear that there is no other mechanical operation
so difficult as that of attaching a shield of metal to the hoof of a
horse. That is an erroneous opinion.

I was once told by an old English shoer that “the man who picked up a
horse’s foot that had never worn a shoe, gave it a brush or two with
a rasp and then nailed on a light piece of iron (an old, half-worn
shoe, perhaps) would do a better job of shoeing than nine-tenths of the
so-called fancy jobs.” I often think of my old English friend, who spent
five, perhaps seven years, as an apprentice trying to master the trade.
How different here in free America, and in these catch-as-catch-can
times. It is not a rare thing to find men who are proprietors of shoeing
shops, whose apprenticeship consisted of six months or a year’s service
as a helper, and the vast army of horses to be shod is owned and
controlled by people who are very much in a hurry, and who give little or
no attention to the care of horses’ feet.

So the “family pet,” as Trotwood has called him, goes lame. He is taken
to the shoeing shop in the belief that the shoer can relieve him. Now,
this shoer is a human being, flesh and blood like other men, and it is
extremely difficult for horseshoers to be strictly honest. (I speak from
experience.) The fact is, he wants to tell the owner that his horse is
too highly fed for the amount of exercise he is getting. He would like to
tell him that high calks and dry stalls are slowly, but surely, drawing
his hoofs together, causing a lateral pressure of the wall on the more
sensitive internal parts, and he thinks of many other things that point
to the duty of the care-taker. But I have found that, usually, that kind
of talk don’t suit my customers. It puts too much of the responsibility
on them, so the shoer begins at once to look wise. The horseshoer who
knows how to look wise is an artist, born to succeed. Placing his thumbs
in the armholes of his vest, he begins a tirade of abuse on the man who
last shod the horse, after this fashion: “Well, I should think he would
be lame. Any man that don’t know better than to put a pair of cook stoves
like those on a horse’s foot,” etc., etc. After he has removed the “cook
stoves” he proceeds to shoe the horse in his own unapproachable way
polishes the shoes, rasps the hoofs carefully and, perhaps, saturates the
bottoms with oil of tar. He pays the price demanded, takes the horse home
and, when his lameness grows worse instead of better, he comes to the
conclusion that he has been “buncoed.”

A few days ago a grocer’s horse with thick-walled hoofs was brought to
us, shod with heavy shoes and high calks, hoofs badly contracted, and
dead lame. I promised that if given my own way, I would cure him. We
shortened the hoofs, put on a pair of “tips”—just a little patch of
iron on each toe, letting the frog, or what remained of it, down on the
ground. In less than ten days the lameness ceased though he had been lame
for many months. In winter when it is necessary to shoe him with calks
again, he occasionally shows a little lameness, but when spring comes
we go back to the “tips” and the trouble vanishes. The owner of this
horse thinks we performed a miracle, but we did nothing of the kind,
we omitted the fancy rasping, the oil of tar, and the wise look in this
case, and just kept close to nature.

In the days of the old horse cars in the cities I have stood on the
boulder-covered streets of Chicago and watched the car horses, to see how
they were shod. Imagine my surprise when I found hundreds of them shod in
front, with shoes similar to those we used on the grocer’s horse.

When we mortals, who flatter ourselves that we are fashioned after
God’s own image, drift too far from nature’s prescribed course, we soon
discover the folly of our actions. If we don’t, the undertaker, for
a cash consideration backs up to the front door of our house with a
profusely tasseled hearse and starts us on our journey toward the head
waters of Salt river. Meanwhile, the horse goes on, pounding away on the
stony pikes, which, long ago, were substituted for the old bridle paths
and the turf-covered highways, so we resort to metal protection for the
hoof.

I have always looked upon horseshoeing, as practiced in many shops, as a
necessary evil, on a par with the taking into the human system of vile
physics and rank lotions, and when both owner and shoer are equally
ignorant or careless, what must the consequences be?

A number of years ago, a man came to me for advice as to how his family
horse should be shod. I ventured a suggestion and he brought the horse
in. This was early in September. We shod him all round, doing what we
called a first-class job. I advised that the shoes should be reset in
about six weeks. He went away seemingly much pleased, and his joy lasted
all winter.

On the 28th of March he came back with the shoes all on just as we left
them. A few things went through my mind which I thought best not to make
known to my customer. We reset the shoes and I never saw him afterwards.
That was about sixteen years ago, and I presume that when the shoes need
resetting again he will bring the horse to have us look after him.

Just one more: I once shod a banker’s horse all round, early in May. As
he took the horse from the shop he said his reason for having him shod
was on account of turning him out to pasture. Shades of Pegasus, think of
that! During the summer he sold the horse and in November he was brought
to us to be “sharpened up” for the winter. Imagine my surprise when I
discovered that not a shoe had been removed since we put them on early in
May.

I relate these two instances to show that there are difficulties in the
handling of horses’ feet over which the shoer has no control, and which
frequently put him in a frame of mind so that he concludes to abandon the
idea of painstaking, and resolves to be less particular about his work.

While roaming around in this broad, busy country of ours, I have
drifted into many shoeing shops, and have worked in not a few of them.
The greatest fault I find with my fellow craftsmen is their universal
tendency toward overdoing. In their zeal to excel the other fellow
they resort to “fads” and adopt unnecessary methods, many of which are
decidedly injurious to the horse, and you who have horses to be shod
should insist that you prefer a plain, careful job, minus the whittling,
polishing, rasping, etc., and the shoer, in these days of close
competition, will be only too glad to obey orders.

But how shall the owner know what is best for his horse? He is a butcher,
a baker or perhaps he is the time-honored “candlestick maker,” and
is as busy as any of us in this mad rush of to-day, from which there
seems to be no escape. So, really, I don’t believe he ever will give
much attention to his faithful horse’s feet, and between unscrupulous
horseshoers and third-grade veterinary surgeons, “poor old Dobbin” will
continue to be, as he has been in the past, the victim of his master’s
misplaced confidence. What does the average man know about the needs and
requirements of his own body? He has been called “a bundle of habits,”
and from what I can observe, he is about ready to draw a good salary as
the star performer in “a comedy of errors.” But in spite of stumbling
blocks, and millstones around our necks, out of the rank and file of
common men there comes occasionally, an Edison, a Horace Greeley, a
Mark Twain or one like your own Major Thomas, whose portrait adorns
the frontispiece of your March number. From the same source comes an
occasional good, honest, painstaking horseshoer, whose sole ambition is
not for the dollars he may lay up. He is one whom “goodness and mercy
will follow, all the days of his life”—one who knows the importance of
his calling and who realizes that a reputation for sobriety and honesty,
coupled with natural ability and acquired skill, will bring to him the
reward he is seeking.

I have written enough for this time, and what have I said in the above
preamble that will enlighten the reader who really is trying to post
himself on the care of the horse’s foot and the proper method of shoeing
it? He does not desire to become a student of anatomy, and I know from
experience that the advice of an humble knight of the anvil would not be
taken seriously by the majority of horse owners.

But I have in my library two small volumes on shoeing, and the care
of the hoof, which to me are worth their weight in gold. The first
is “Practical Horseshoeing,” by T. Fleming, President of the Central
Veterinary Surgeons’ Medical Society, Edinburgh, Scotland, published by
D. Appleton Co., New York. No honest man, who knows whereof he speaks,
can even criticise this work.

The other is “Pathological Horseshoeing,” by Joseph B. Coleman, V. S.,
which goes a little farther into diseases of the foot and their treatment.

Get these two little books, brother horse owner, and when the good horse
goes lame, bump your head against the side of his stall and think. They
will help you to see how far you are keeping from nature’s ways. Consider
that your horse is made of tissue and nerves, almost as delicate as your
own; that he is entirely at your mercy and unlike the “Devil Wagon,” he
cannot be patched up with files, monkey-wrenches and cement.

                                                                LA FORGE.

Pecatonica, Ill.




                           TROTWOOD’S MONTHLY

                     Devoted to Farm, Horse and Home.

                TROTWOOD PUBLISHING CO., Nashville, Tenn.
                     Office 150 Fourth Ave., North.

                          JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE,
                            Editor-in-Chief.

                E. E. SWEETLAND       Business Manager.

                GEO. E. McKENNON             President.
                JOHN W. FRY             Vice-President.
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                WOOTEN MOORE                     Sec’y.

     TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION: One Year, $1.00; Single Copy, 10 cents.
                    Advertising Rates on application.

                      NASHVILLE, TENN., MAY, 1906.




With Trotwood


Human Registration.

Mr. Thos. J. Moore, of Moore’s, S. C., writes: “Have you your family
genealogy? You seem to be up on horse pedigree. I’d like to have it, if
not too much trouble.”

Alas and alack! but that is the trouble with most of us. We pedigree our
horses and dogs, but we throw off terribly on our sons and daughters. Any
old pedigree seems good enough for them. In the language of the Bible,
“Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this thing?” What a Book it is!
“For I, the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquities of
the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generations of
them that hate me, and shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me
and keep my commandments.” There is authority for a pedigreed man. And
the Book itself—chapters are given to the pedigree of one man. The Bible
loves a good pedigree. It is a great registration Book of the Jews. Did
you ever see Moses’ pedigree tabulated—Moses, the greatest man in the
Bible except One? It tells a wonderful story. He was the most inbred man
that ever lived. And so was the mother of the Christ. These things will
do to study and think about.

As for me, I am constrained to say that the quiet study of the pedigree
of horses has taught me much. I have picked up a few of the great lessons
of cause and effect in studying the lower animal that should apply to
the higher one. That is the only way. Darwin reached the laws of his
evolution by beginning with the lowest form of life.

I hold it to be a crime for any human being to bring into the world an
offspring which he knows will be inferior to himself. He owes it to
posterity to breed up. The mother is what breeds up. The white man who
brands his unborn child a mongrel deserves death at the hands of the
rest of his race. Death, because, like the murderer, he is pulling down
society. The murderer takes what he cannot restore. But this man does
worse—he chains his own child for life to a dead body.

It is a crime because it is the duty of all to breed up—to produce
something by well chosen marriage better than themselves. It should be
a criminal offense—as it already is a moral one—to bring into the world
peoples with maimed heads, maimed souls and yellow bodies. The Greeks
were right—it is only through a pure breed that man may reach the stars.
The Bible is right—it always is: pedigree counts most.

What a pity all the world does not go into the horse business and study
the effects of heredity long enough to learn a little common sense about
the breeding of that highest of animals—man! What a pity they cannot get
off their little bicycles long enough to get the hump out of their backs
and the wheels out of their heads, and learn that like, in man or horse,
poet or donkey, produces like or the likeness of an ancestor! Will
people never learn that falling in love is often nothing in the world but
an accident, and often more fatal than falling down an elevator shaft?
Will they never stop to think that they haven’t any more right to afflict
their unborn children with the crotches, cranks, whims, crookedness and
conceit of their own souls than they have to murder them after they are
born? Ye gods, and is it from this that immortality is made?

Some day, for the benefit of humanity, I propose to open a Registration
Book. I want to do this because I want to see people take as much
interest in their own children as they do in their horses, and as much
interest in their own pedigree as they do in their dog’s. Many a man
“falls in love” with, and marries, a woman whose qualities, character and
pedigree, if wrapped up in a horse’s hide, he wouldn’t be caught trading
an old blind mule for; and many a woman, under the same silly pressure,
marries some vicious brute “to reform him,” who if turned into a buggy
horse, with half the meanness that he had inherited, she wouldn’t risk
her poodle dog behind.

And here is the way I would go to registering my people. In all
registration there must first be a foundation stock. I would let
truthfulness, honesty and work count as “foundation stock.” This would
change the present standard radically, and let into life a foundation of
good blood that at present is entirely neglected and not allowed to come
in at all unless it happens to come in under a dress suit. I would then
let accomplishments—the ability to do—from the ability to do poetry to
the ability to make two blades of grass grow where one grew before—count
as my classes, and it wouldn’t take me long to straighten out old
humanity and proceed to breed a race of people fit to live.

Here it is:

                       Trotwood’s Human Standard.

    When white men and women meet the following requirements and
    are duly registered, they shall be accepted as standard bred
    and shall be permitted to marry:

    1. Any white man who has earned and saved one thousand dollars,
    provided he is honest, industrious and truthful, and is sound
    in wind, limb, and mind.

    2. Any white woman who can cook a square meal, make her
    own clothes, keep a house clean and play on some musical
    instrument, provided always that she is pure, lives under some
    moral standard and will agree to raise her children under it.

    3. Every man who is the father of a great man or woman.

    4. Every woman who is the mother of a great man or woman.

    5. Geniuses, however cranky.

    6. The father and mother of a genius.

                             Non-Standard.

    The following shall be non-standard, and neither they nor their
    children shall be registered:

    1. Old bachelors from choice.

    2. Cranks.

    3. Liars.

    4. The impure.

    5. Diseased persons and the children of consumptives, the
    cancerous and the insane.

    6. The children of impure married women.

    7. Society people wherever found and their one child.

    8. Married men who lead germans.

    9. Women who eat onions, drink beer or whiskey, or chew gum.

    10. The children of women who play cards for money or for
    prizes. They keep up the supply of gamblers.

    11. Evangelists who preach slang and dirty sermons from the
    pulpit.

    12. Dialect poets.

    13. Praying lawyers.

    14. Bank cashiers who run Sunday-schools.

    15. Doctors who give much medicine and cut people open.

    16. The last three ought really to be damned.

    17. People who have reached middle age and still say: “I
    taken,” “You hadn’t ought to,” “I seen him,” and “It is me.”

    Given under the hand and seal, stamped and delivered by

                                                           TROTWOOD.


Old Wash’s Ma.

Editor Trotwood’s:

Your writings as they appeared in the Horse Review always appealed to me,
especially the “Old Wash” stories, and I remember some years ago that
some one was impertinent enough to ask the age of Old Wash. Of course,
that fellow wasn’t entitled to an answer, but as I have run across a
clipping of an old negro woman whom I am sure must be old Wash’s mother
(I hope you can verify it), I want him to look her up. The fact that he
felt young enough to marry (the unlucky thirteenth) it might interest him
to be able to tell his troubles to his ma.

Your magazine is a welcome monthly visitor, and may it always come up
to the standard you have planned for it is my earnest wish. Here is the
story:

Barnum, the great showman, hearing of an old negro woman down in
Tennessee who claimed to be 125 years old, called to see her with a view
to securing her for a side show. He found that the old woman was really
very ancient, and commenced to question to find out just how old she
really was. He said to her:

“Auntie, do you remember George Washington?”

“I reckon I duz, sah; I’se played wid him many a day.”

“Do you remember anything about the Revolutionary War?” asked Barnum.

“Well, I should say I duz,” replied the old lady. “I ’members when de
bullets wuz a flyin’ and a zoonin’ round here laik bumblebees, sah.”

“What do you remember about the fall of the Roman empire?” said Barnum.

The old woman was “stumped” for a moment, but, recovering herself,
replied:

“I wuz a mighty leetle gal den’ but I ’members hearin’ de ole folk say
dat dey heerd sumpin’ drap.”

                                                          E. J. FERGUSON.

Washington, Pa.

[Illustration: Photo by Julie Royster, Raleigh, N. C.]




Trotwood’s Travels


LITTLE JOURNEYS THROUGH THE SOUTH—FLORENCE ALABAMA.

It is fitting that the story of the journey to Florence, Ala., should
appear In the same issue with Jackson’s march into the Creek Nation;
for the story of this pretty little city on the Tennessee, between the
foothills of the mountains and the cotton plains beyond, is literally
thumb-marked with Old Hickory.

Andrew Jackson knew and understood what was good in woman, in man and
in land. In these he never erred. Never in his life did he tie on to
a quitter or touch a yellow streak. When he stamped the seal of his
friendship on a man or woman, or drove the steel of his compass[1] on
land he had decided to buy, they were already registered. And history, a
century later, will tell you they were not false.

When a man’s judgment, like his literature, stands the test of a century,
it is good for all time.

But before the white man was the Indian, and before the Indian, the Mound
Builders. The Mound Builders never were known to settle on poor land.
They found Florence before the Indian, before the white man, before the
hero of New Orleans.

It is beautiful to speculate about those people. Who they were and what
they were only their great, silent mound monuments tell, and they are as
dumb as the unreturning past.

The mound they built where the great creek meets the Tennessee is a
perfect and splendid specimen of their custom. Scholars say it was
built for religious worship—not to bury their dead within, and it is
one of a series in the valley of the Tennessee. What robed, mysterious
priest and peoples once worshiped around it? What censers of eternal fire
burned always on its summit? What white-robed maidens met a sacrificial
death on its summit overlooking the river? What warriors thronged around
it, chanting their battle songs and dipping their spear points in the
victims’ blood?

    “Forever and forever flows the river,
      Forever and forever rolls the plain—
    Forever shall the pale stars ’round them quiver,
      But never shall their past return again.
    Hyperion dawns but light their frieze in vain,
      And moons peer sadly through the columned way,
    The midday glares on what doth yet remain
      Of faded glory with a mocking play—
      Thus passeth into shadow man’s imperial sway.”

[1] The following letter addressed to Gen. Dan Smith is preserved in
Nashville:

                                                “October 29th, 1795.

    “Sir: Captain John Hays and myself wish to have our land
    divided; for which purpose to-morrow is appointed, wish to
    get the favor of you to do the business, as we wish it done
    accurate; therefore hope you will do us the favor to come to
    my house this evening, so that we may take an early start
    to-morrow. Will thank you to bring with you your compass and
    chain. If you cannot come will thank you to favor me with the
    loan of your compass and chain by the bearer. I am, sir with
    the highest esteem, your most obedient servant,

                                          [Signed] “Andrew Jackson.”

       *       *       *       *       *

At the sale of the first lots in Florence in July, 1818, James Madison
(who but a few years before had been elected President of the young
Republic, and Andrew Jackson, who in a few years more was destined to be
another of her Presidents) both bought lots in the new town, then, as
now, a goodly, fair site in the bend where the Tennessee, hugging the
Southern hills as if to escape the mouth of the foaming, passionate,
tumultuous shoals, shrinks away, and, like a beautiful woman when she
throws off her mantle in the ball room, exposes shoulders fair to see.

They were fair enough in the wilderness to stop Jackson and Madison.
Jackson must have seen the beautiful site for a city on this most
beautiful and lordly river often. On his first taste of Indian fighting
he crossed it somewhere near Florence, when pioneer Tennesseans struck
the Indian marauders who lived at the great Coldwater spring at the
present site of Tuscumbia, a few miles beyond. Later his troops crossed
it down the old military road he cut out from Nashville to Pensacola,
when they marched to New Orleans, to glory or to death. The gap in the
mountainous hills near where the graceful bridge of the Louisville &
Nashville crosses the river is still pointed out as the spot where the
heroes of New Orleans pontooned across from the mouth of the creek.
Methinks the old hero never forgot this spot—the great, splendid river,
wooded, hill-crowned, plain-girdled and thunder-foamed with the spray
from the long-leaping, shining shoals.

[Illustration: Rifle pits on hill at Florence used by Confederate
soldiers.]

He was young when he first saw it. He had made no name and no history. He
was only a common, ordinary, hot-blooded, dare-devil, cussin’, fighting
Irish boy, lank of form, peaked of face and forehead, with piercing blue
eyes, a thin, lofty, religious, idealized, hatchety head, bequeued with
bristling, sandy-red hair.

You may think I am foolish to call him religious, but be patient. A man
is born religious or not. And if born so, all his wildness and fighting
and bloodshed and profanity will not eliminate it. No man had more of
it than Jackson. He was naturally religious. Whenever the passions and
fightings of his combatitive trend and nature gave him a breathing spell
he fell back in every deed and act on the Scotch-Irish predestination
of his breeding. Mr. Eaton walked one night into President Jackson’s
bed room. He was preparing to retire. The miniature of the dead Rachel
Jackson, which he wore next to his heart, with a silk string around his
neck, underneath his clothes, lay on the table by her open Bible. He was
reading the Bible, with tears in his eyes, and by him he had her picture
to help him interpret it.

Some may not think this is religion. But it is religion of the deepest
kind.

Florence is full of history, and history that counts.

John Coffee, Jackson’s right-hand general at New Orleans, and who
married Rachel Jackson’s niece, was one of the founders of the town, a
corporation known as The Cypress Creek Land Company. The old hero lies
buried in a nearby hill. A gallant man he was, sturdy and true, and
Jackson often said that but for him at New Orleans he knew not what he
would have done. Old Hickory said that, but, rely upon it, he would have
done something just the same.

Another incorporator was Col. James Jackson, whose old colonial home
still stands at the Forks, the original plantation covering several
thousand acres of as goodly land as ever felt the pressure of a race
horse. For here it was that many famous race horses lived and bred their
kind. Col. James Jackson imported Glencoe, a horse, to my mind, greater
than any that Old Hickory or any of the Tennesseeans ever imported. Often
James Jackson would meet the Tennesseeans in fierce contests of the turf,
in the Tennessee valley or at the old Clover Bottom, and the laurels were
more often with the Alabamian.

In going through the court records, back to the old books in search
of early history of this beautiful town, I find some queer and quaint
documents. I did not search closely, but what little I did see convinced
me that James Madison must have come very near going broke on Florence.
People who are used to booms in these days of cities, railroads, mines,
spindles, furnaces and a fast-increasing population don’t know what a
pioneer boom really was. Here in the heart of a wilderness a roadless
territory, the land still flecked with the blood of the white and the
red, the nearest town a village on the Cumberland, one hundred and fifty
miles away, and only a few settlers along the bluffs of the river,
with savage Indians lurking in the interior—no peoples, no cities, no
industries—nothing but a yoke of oxen and a wilderness of uncleared land
upon which to base coupons for the future—here was a boom to make one
smile.

The lots were untouched forests jutting out on an Indian trail to the
river. And yet the one on which the present bank stands fetched over
$3,000, and the one just below the courthouse and diagonally across
fetched $1,840! Here is faith for you—here is booming that booms. If
such men as Jackson and Madison pinned their faith there like that,
in July, 1818, what splendid opportunities now offer themselves for
faith in a town which, as one stands on the hillside looking down on
the same great river, sees it covered with a cloud, not from the sky,
but from earth—from furnace and factory, and behold, the valley of
erstwhile woods, the busy mart of men in homes and houses. And two great
railroads—the Louisville & Nashville and the Southern—and one great
river, to keep freight down.

The total sale of the first two or three hundred lots was $233,580.
Andrew Jackson bought lot 6 for $350; Nos. 57 to 62, for $250 to $400.
Madison bought lot No. 28 for $300; 39 for $390; 41 to 44, $400 to $600.

Madison made his first payments, and then—let them all go for taxes!
Evidently the great expounder of the Constitution and President of the
United States took his first lesson in boom towns when Fate sent him to
the Tennessee River to close up an Indian treaty.

And he must have been easy. Oh, if the real estate agents of to-day could
always meet his kidney!

Further tracing of old records shows that he caught it all around.
November 1st, 1826, I find that James Madison appointed one Dabney Morris
his agent to handle “all his lands in Alabama, all lots in Florence,
also eight shares of stock in Cypress Land Company.” On August 22, 1826,
is an agreement in which James Madison extends the time of payment of a
judgment he held against one Bedford amounting to $4,680.96. And, worst
of all, Dabney Morris laid down on him, for later a record shows that
Morris’ notes to Madison went to protest, to satisfy which the said
Morris turned over land to said Madison to the tune of $24,866—a small
fortune in those days (in money, not in land) when money was worth nearly
double what it now is. In the slang language of to-day, they evidently
“did enough to Jimmy.”

But Old Hickory paid for his. It is not recorded that he lost a cent. Old
Hickory was born holding on. He never turned loose.

And to show what things cost in those days: On October 20, 1819, Thomas
Childress and W. W. Warner, who had been appointed to sell the effects
and settle up the estate of a deceased pioneer, report the sale of
the following: Twelve negro slaves, $4,200; five head of horses, $225
($45 each—ye gods! Evidently they were not Hals); twenty-three head of
cattle, $165 (that was before the beef trust); twenty-nine head of hogs,
$86.50; five beds and furniture, $100; two spinning wheels, $2; two rifle
guns, $22; ‘one pare saddle bags,’ $1; and five ‘setting chairs,’ $2.50
(‘setting chairs’—this was evidently the beginning of the incubator
idea). Just below it John W. Byrne sells a nineteen-year-old negro to
James Hickman for $460, whom he guarantees to be “sound, healthy, clear
of any disorder whatever.” And land sales—some of it fetched fifty
dollars per acre. That was before it was cleared, too.

It can now be bought for $10 to $25 an acre, and will raise two crops in
one year!

If there was any faith for their belief nearly a century ago, what a
chance now for the man who invests in Florence or in Lauderdale land!

       *       *       *       *       *

Some months ago I found a rare old book which has afforded me a great
deal of pleasure as well as information. It is called “Letters from
Alabama,” by Anne Royal, whom it seems was a most eccentric old woman,
afflicted with a mania for writing down everything she saw or heard
(and remarkably well she did it) on a trip by stage and horseback which
she made for the purpose of seeing the new country. She left Washington
November, 1817, and reached Melton’s Bluff, on the Tennessee River, about
New Year. Her description of men and things in the new country is the
most interesting I have ever read, and the most accurate. As Melton’s
Bluff, as she called the place, is not far from Florence (I think it was
afterwards called Marathon), I will give some of her descriptions of the
new country as it looked then, six months before Florence was laid out
into town lots:

“You have heard that this country consists of table and bottom land, also
of the bluffs. These bluffs happen where there is no bottom land, but the
tableland running up to the river forms a high precipice, called a bluff.
This is the case at Melton’s Bluff, the highest I have seen. Here is a
very large plantation of cotton and maize, worked by about sixty slaves,
owned by General Jackson, who bought the interests of old Melton.

“No language can convey an idea of the beauties of Melton’s Bluff. It is
said to be the handsomest spot in the world, off the seaboard, and rich
as it is beautiful. I can sit in my room and see the whole plantation;
the boats gilding down the river, and the opposite shore, one mile
distant. The ducks, geese and swan, playing at the same time on the bosom
of the stream, with a full view of the many islands. It is, after all,
the great height of the site that pleases.

“I took a walk with some ladies to-day over the plantation, as we wished
to have a nearer view of those snowy fields which so sedulously present
themselves to our view, together with orchards, gin houses, gardens,
Melton’s mansion, and a considerable negro town.

“We approached the mansion by a broad street running up the river bank
east of the town. This street seems suspended between heaven and earth,
as the whole premises for two miles, all in sight, appears to be elevated
above the horizon, and none above the rest. We entered the courtyard,
fronting the house, by a stile; and the first thing we met was a large
scaffold overspread with cotton; as it was in the seed, there must have
been many thousand pounds. Being damp from dew, and often rain, it must
be dried in this manner. The mansion was large, built with logs, shingled
roof, and may have been built twenty-five or thirty years since. I
recoiled at the sight of a place once the habitation of such a monster
as Melton was. Some of our party went in: I did not. General Jackson’s
overseer, who joined us here, said he lived in the lower story, the
upper being filled with cotton. This scaffold was about four feet from
the ground. From this we crossed another fence, and found ourselves in a
cotton field of about one hundred acres, white with cotton and alive with
negroes. The center of this field is said to be the rallying point of
viewing the scenery, as it doubtless is. You can see up to Brown’s Ferry,
eight miles distant, with the naked eye, and the same distance down.

“The term ‘beauty’ is applied to anything which excites pleasant
feelings. Beauty is said to be a uniformity amidst variety, a proportion
of parts adapted to a whole, fitness of things to an end, quantity and
simplicity. All this is realized on Melton’s Bluff. Here is a noble river
which combines in itself all you can conceive of grandeur and utility,
adorned with islands, spangled with boats, and enlivened with wild
flowers. Lift your eye from the river, and lo! magnificent fields, white
as snow, orchards, farms and houses all in view, without moving out of
the spot. You may thus form some idea of this far-famed bluff. Here the
green islands look like floating meadows. Here the boatman wields his
mossy oar and guides his freighted boat along. Here the wild fowl arrayed
in glossy plumes, wantons as she lists. Here the distant billows breaking
o’er the shoals, echo back in murmuring sounds, and mingling sweetly
with the music of the boatman’s viol, swells upon the ear and softly
dies away upon the breeze. To crown the whole, here the majestic swan,
robed in dazzling white, moves in all her graceful attitudes. These are
beauties which may be felt but cannot be described. This combination of
objects, each beautiful in itself, and so materially useful, constitutes
the beauty of Melton’s Bluff. All the trade of East Tennessee pass by the
Bluff and halt there to take in their pilots.”

[Illustration: The Indian Mound on the banks of the Tennessee River, at
Florence, Ala.]

Can description be more beautiful? Anne Royal, whoever she was, could
write classic English for her day and generation.

From Huntsville, December 25, 1817, she wrote: “The face of this country
has changed five times in my tour. From Big Sandy river (the boundary
of Kentucky and Virginia) to Mount Sterling, the soil is black, firm,
uneven and covered with heavy timber, beech and oak principally. From Mt.
Sterling to Danville, called first-rate land, it is generally black as
your hat and the growth is locust, cherry and walnut. They continue to
the Red river, in Tennessee, one hundred miles. They are not a dead or
prairie-like level, but rather waving.

“Next to them comes on the lofty timbered black, rich soil and large
grape vines and continues to Nashville. Upon leaving Nashville the
red cedar begins and though the land is still rich, it is much
interrupted with swamps and stones. This is well watered and continues
to Fayetteville, on Elk River, near the southern boundary of the State.
There again we have the black loam and heavy timber, till within eighteen
miles of Huntsville, when the chocolate lands commence again, like the
barrens; though light, it is not destitute of timber. All of these lands
extend from the mountains on the left, to the Ohio on the right. We
forded all the rivers in Kentucky and Tennessee except Kentucky river.
The Kentuckians are the handsomest people, by far, in the United States.
They are not very stout men, but have fine features and very beautiful
complexions. The Tennesseans are not so stout as the Kentuckians, nor
so fair, but they are well shaped and more active. There is a native,
bold independence in both, with this difference: the Kentuckians are
great brags, whilst the Tennesseans, equally as brave and gallant, are
wholly unconscious of their virtues. What astonished me most was their
careless indifference on the subject of their late gallant achievement,
particularly at New Orleans. They spoke of it with perfect unconcern, and
only mentioned it when applied to, and then not half the same interest
they would show on the subject of hunting and killing deer. Not so the
Kentuckians—they appreciate their bravery to the greatest extent. The
Kentucky ladies are very large, but are fair and well featured, and
much more polished (excepting the ladies of Nashville) than the ladies
of Tennessee; but the latter are better shaped, are very artless and
the young women have a sweet simplicity in their looks and countenance.
Both men and women are without disguise, nor have they any of that
impertinent curiosity common to other States. But the most distinguishing
trait of the Tennessean is that he treats all men alike. The nabob, with
his splendid equipage, receives no more nor as much attention as the
pedestrian. They are extremely jealous of wealthy, or what we call big,
men. One of them, as I came on, being asked rather peremptorily by one of
the big bugs, to rub down his horse, cursed him and told him to ‘Do it
yourself—I am no man’s servant.’

“Last evening I had the pleasure of seeing General Coffee, the renowned
soldier and companion of General Jackson. This hero, of whom you have
heard so much, is upward of six feet in height, and proportionately wide.
Nor did I ever see so fine a figure. He is thirty-five or thirty-six
years of age, his face is full, and features handsome. His complexion
is ruddy, though sunburned. His hair and eyes black and a soft serenity
diffuses his countenance. His hair is carelessly thrown to one side
and displays one of the finest foreheads in nature—high, smooth and
retreating. His countenance has much animation while speaking and his
eye sparkles. I expected to see a stern, haughty, fierce warrior. No
such thing. You look in vain for the Indian fighter. He is as cool as a
dewdrop, but deep in his soul you see very plain that desperate, firm,
cool and manly courage which has covered him with glory. He must be a
host when he is aroused. He speaks very slowly and may weigh about 200
weight.”

From Milton’s Bluff (which she says was afterward changed to Marathon),
January 18, 1818, she writes: “Good news awaits you. Read on. Having
collected a few books in a corner I heard some one say: ‘General Jackson,
General Jackson comes,’ and running to my window I saw him walking slowly
up the hill between two gentlemen, his aids. He was dressed in a blue
frock coat, with epaulettes, a common hat, with a black cockade and a
sword by his side. He is very tall and slender. He walked on by our door
to Major Wyatt’s, his companion in arms, where he put up for the night,
though he called on us that evening and the next morning. His person is
finely shaped and his features not handsome, but strikingly bold and
determined. He is very easy and affable in his manners, and loves a jest.
He told one of our party he ‘was one of the blue hen’s chickens.’ He
appears to be about fifty years old. There is a great deal of dignity
about him. He related many hardships endured by his men in the army, but
never a word of his own. His language is pure and fluent, and he has
the appearance of having kept the best company. He has been ordered by
the government against the Seminole Indians. His army is on the march
considerably ahead of him, having crossed at Ditto’s Landing, up the
river, but he came round by this place, to see his plantation and slaves.”

       *       *       *       *       *

And what of those lands to-day, and what are the inducements they offer
to the Northern farmer seeking a home in the South? Meeting a very
intelligent and reliable farmer, Mr. W. M. Sammon, who had moved from
Dalton, Ill., to Lauderdale country, near Florence, some seven years
ago, I interviewed him on this subject, reminding him that Trotwood’s
was a medium which would rather under-estimate than over-color the
picture; that a people did not take much stock in highly-colored pictures
of glorious Edens, finding them to be untrue and as such hurting all
concerned. “That is true,” said Mr. Sammon, “and well said. Many hundreds
of Northern people are misled by such statements and become disgusted
when the real facts are enough to captivate any one wishing to make a
home here. To begin with, I sold my land in Illinois at three times what
just as good, if not better, land cost me here, with three more months in
the year for working it. I found the land just as level as in Illinois,
and hence I could use the same tools I had there for corn, wheat, oats
and alfalfa. I find red clover grows here just as well as in Illinois,
and other grasses we cannot grow there, such, for instance, as Bermuda,
which will grow anywhere here and make the finest summer pasture in the
world, standing sun and drought when other grasses would die. The land
does not produce as much corn per acre as does Illinois. Corn in the
South, owing to the longer climate, goes much to stalk and fewer stalks
can be planted in the hill, but mine produces from twenty-five to forty
bushels on the upland and as high as sixty in richer lowlands. But this
is to a great extent offset by the difference in price, selling here
all the time at sixty to seventy cents, whereas in the North we do well
to get forty cents per bushel. All kinds of live stock I find do better
here, for they are not troubled with flies, and hence we have no nets to
plough under, nor screens for the house. One of the greatest problems
to the farmer in Illinois is help. Last fall a friend of mine came here
and told me he had to help his wife wash the clothes every week. I paid
$25 and board for my farm help up there, but here I get good help at
$8 to $10 and board. As for water, there is no comparison. Up there it
was ponds and cisterns, but here is a country of springs. I never saw
anything like it. Creeks, too, with beds full of gravel, which make the
finest roads in the world. It is the best watered and healthiest country
I ever saw. The water here is plentiful and easy of access.

“The greatest crop I have found here to build up the land is peas—the
Southern pea. It is equal to clover as a nitrogen producing crop,
enriching the land, and as a money-maker it beats anything in the North.
I sow peas in my corn every third row and run round it a few times. It is
laid by with the corn. I can make ten dollars worth of pork per acre in
peas and leave the land better than it was. I can raise all stock cheaper
here, even turkeys, on account of the peas and grasshoppers. There are
nine months of pasture, year in and year out. The land is not as rich as
in Illinois, but I make more, owing to peas. My clover there, I could
hardly give away, it selling at $2 to $4 per ton, but here I find ready
sale for my pea hay at $12 to $15 per ton, and raise more per acre than
clover. Wheat needs some fertilizers here, as the belt is far south, but
it produces fairly well. I find good money in raising mules. Pastures are
so cheap that they practically cost nothing. I buy western mares, good
workers, very cheap, and raise a mule worth $150 that is not housed at
all and runs in the pasture or on cane all the year.

“The climate is mild and pleasant. People have a mistaken idea as to
the heat. It is not as hot here as there, for the heat is steady, even
temperature, and a good breeze in the summer.

“I think I know when I have a good thing, and I am sorry I have not lived
here all my life. I have made more money and enjoyed better health, and
the people are kind, neighborly and hospitable. They are not after the
dollar alone.”

This is the talk of a straightforward, practical farmer, who knows what
he is talking about, and what he says the reader of Trotwood’s may rely
upon.

       *       *       *       *       *

Florence is at the head of the famous Mussel Shoals, the opening of which
has cost Uncle Sam the sum of seven million dollars.

[Illustration: Where Hood’s army crossed the Tennessee River at Florence,
Ala., November, 1864.]

Uncle Sam never does anything on a small scale, and here, at
headquarters, on the banks of the clear, silver river, where seven
millions of dollars have been appropriated to unlock 660 miles of
navigable water and 1,000 miles of tributary streams, all of which had
been locked in the beginning of things and its key hidden to all save
the unconquerable spirit of American enterprise, here everything was in
keeping with the magnitude of the undertaking and the build and mold of
things. It is a paradise in the woods, an Arcadia in primeval forests.
It is strength and beauty—a touch of modern art on a background of
the antique, a background of rock and beetling cliff, in a setting of
sternest and ruggedest realism. Modern houses for offices on the brow
of a rock, whose crinkled lips smile a grim and perpetual smile, as if
enjoying the joke that a few thousand years will make in the change
of man’s baubles above it. Handsome government buildings on a level
plateau, surrounded with silence and eternal hills, which half-mockingly
look down, as if to say, “Did we not see it ten thousand years ago,
when another civilization did the same?” Steel aqueducts, leading
captive waters across Shoal creek—a tube of steel binding the waist
of this barbarian of the woods, that civilization might walk over his
breast—water flowing across water, and that below grumbling with spiteful
whirl and jealousy at the usurpation above. A rare picture of the present
and the past, of strength and weakness, of beauty and grandeur, but
above all the never-changing setting of eternal hills, and through it all
the sigh of perpetual silence unbroken by this ripple of living laughter
which scarcely touches the skirts of its dream.

No prettier ride than that on the little government railroad which runs
for fourteen miles on the edge of the canals and locks, and between it
and the river. Now it shoots through classic-looking caves, in somber
woods, that brings to one’s mind Keats’ Temple of Latona:

    Beyond the matron temple of Latona
      Which we should see but for these darkening boughs
      Lies a deep hollow from whose ragged brows
    Bushes and trees do lean all round athwart.

Now it whirls around a great, lofty cliff, around whose neck the red
berries cling like beads on savage shoulders, and then into valleys where
the skies seem to stoop down to kiss the river.

It is a poem to look at all this—a never-forgotten poem—a poem, and an
opera to live and act it.

       *       *       *       *       *

Strolling through the grounds which Uncle Sam has made to look like
a paradise in the wilderness, I ran upon a unique character in Uncle
Reuben Paterson, one of your old-time darkies. Uncle Rube is a character
in his way. A giant in stature, except a lameness which has made him
always prefer riding to walking. Hence this yarn. He is one of the few
darkies you meet who is really humorous. Many people think all darkies
are more or less funny, and while they are, it is rarely you find one
who appreciates the humorous, from an intellect capable of seeing it.
It took me some time to draw Uncle Rube out—he is a darky of more than
usual intelligence—but when he found I was fond of horses he gave this
experience of his in the Civil War:

“You see, boss, I wuz body servant for Colonel Josiah Patterson, endu’in’
de wah, an’ I got inter some purty close places. Bein’ crippled, I seldom
could walk much, so I was mighty nigh raised on a hoss. I regards ’em
ez bein’ made fur man, an’ I allers thought I wuz entitled to my sheer.
Talk about these heah merchines dats run widout hosses, I’d like ter
know whut dey’d done in de wah! De wah suited me fine. I got a new hoss
ebry time I wanted ’im. Ebry fight we’d get inter I’d come out on a new
hoss. I started in on a little gray jackass. At Shiloh I swapped ’im off
fer a good government mule. Dat is ter say, I allers called it swappin’
yer know. It’s true Uncle Sam didn’ hev nobody ter repersent ’im at de
swappin, but when de fight gits hot an’ his nat’ul agents gits kinder
rattled and retires kinder briefly to de reah fur consultation, a-leabin’
fine mules stampedin’ ’roun’ an’ tryin’ ter tramp on my toes, dey needn’
wonder ef I swaps den an’ dar. ’Taint my nature to let no mule tramp
’roun’ over me. Wall, sur, in de scrimmage in Kentucky I swapped de mule
fur a fine, gray mare. She wuz mighty good, but wuz kinder mixed gaited.
I wuz ’fraid she mout be a knee-banger when I called on her fur speed in
a close place, an’ yer know we hed ter come out’n Kentucky purty fas’,
boss, purty fas’. We hed cross-firin’ ernuff frum de Yankees, widout
bein’ mounted on a mare dat kep’ it up too! Wall, sur, at Mission’ry
Ridge I swapped her off fer a black stallion thet come tearin’ out’n de
ranks in de full regalier uv a colonel’s saddle, bridle an’ holster. An’
he wuz a good one, an’ I didn’ think he’d need any hobbles. I rid ’im a
little while an’ den give ’im ter my colonel. It come so easy ter swap
fer ’em I’d ruther do it den ter eat. Whilst de fight wuz goin’ on I’d be
swappin’ hosses, an’ I’m black ef in de battle uv Stone Ribber I didn’
mouty nigh mount ebry man in de company. Whilst dey wuz fightin’ I wuz
swappin’ hosses, an’ I done hit all frum one little ole bay mule. Ef de
wah hed gone on much longer, I b’lieve I’d swapped Uncle Sam afoot.

“But yer ax me about close places. Wall, et warn’t allers a honeymoon. I
b’lieves ’twuz in ’63, ennyway we wuz holdin’ back Gin’ral Blair’s corps,
an’ Marse Josiah sont me through de enemy ter git ’im er new uniform.
Bein’ a nigger, uv co’se I cud pass off fer ennything. I hed dem clo’es
an’ wuz steppin th’u’ de ranks all right, when I run splank-dab up agin a
reg’ment uv Yankees. I hed de good sense ter th’ow Colonel Josiah’s fine
cloes ober in er thicket, an’ ’tend lak I wuz a Union nigger gwine ter
meetin. Sez de colonel:

“‘You damned pair uv brackets, whar yer gwine?’

“‘Gwine ter meetin’, boss,’ sez I.

“‘Wall, we’re needin’ a teamster right now more’n you need salvation, so
I guess we’ll get you to team a little for us.’

“‘Boss, I cain’t drive er waggin,’ sez I.

“‘Yer cain’t? Wal, we’ll call up er drumhead cote martial in de mawnin’
an’ see erbout it. Yer knows whut dat means, don’t yer?’

“‘Boss,’ sez I, ‘dat’ll jes fetch on mo’ talkin’ an’ sputin, so I’ll do
de bes’ I kin ter drive er team.’

“I noticed de colonel wuz mounted on be finest black hoss I hed eber
seen, an’ ez dey hed treated me so bad, I concluded den an’ dar I’d
swap fer ’im. Dat night dey tuck me to haidquarters an’ made me sleep
jes’ outside de colonel’s tent. I’d seed whar dey hed tethered de hoss
down by de fence, so ’bout ’leben o’clock, I laid out by de tent, jes
outside, and made lak I’d gone ter sleep. When all wuz quiet, I run my
han’ under de tent an’ pulled ez easy ez I cud, twell I pulled out de
colonel’s bridle. Den I pulled er little at er time twell I got de saddle
and holsters, pistols an’ all. I slipped ’em off, put ’em on dat hoss,
struck up de crick so ez ter keep frum bringin’ on enny furder talk wid
de pickets, an’ I rid dat hoss inter camp, twenty odd miles away, in jes
two hours. O, he wuz er dandy, saddle an’ all. Marse Josiah rid dat hoss
mouty nigh two years, but I kep’ on a-swappin’.

“But de funnies’ thing happened down in Mississippi whilst we wuz
fightin’ Sherman ’roun’ Jackson. Dar wuz er nigger dar named Torm. Torm,
he wuz de body-servant ob de colonel ob er Tennessee reg’ment, an’ hed er
mighty rep fer bein’ de bes’ furrager in camp. I didn’ ’fess ter bein’
much uv er furrager, but I know Torm cudn’ hold er candle ter me. Marse
Josiah ’u’d laff an’ say:

[Illustration: The Forks and the famous old home of Jas. Jackson. He
imported Glencoe and owned many famous racers.]

“‘When Rube goes er-furragin’ you’d think we’d done struck de valley ob
de Nile.’

“Wal, Sherman wuz keepin’ us purty hot, an’ grub wuz hard ter fin’. In
our marchin’ one day I seed a mighty fine mud-lark ober in a farmer’s
orchard.

“What’s a mud-lark,” I asked.

“Wal, a mud-lark in wah times,” said Uncle Rube, “is a fatt’nin’ shote,
an’ I wanted dis one, but I wanted to tote fair wid Torm, an’ dat
ebenin’ I ’proached ’im on de subjec’ uv gwine in partnership wid me an’
dervidin dat hawg up ’twixt our messes. Now, I knowed Torm w’u’d steal de
repertashun ob er guvment mule, but when I proached ’im, you jes orter
seed ’im git indignant an’ ’low he wuz er genl-mun an’ w’u’dn’ steal no
hawg an’ er Christian, an’ all dat. Wall, sur, wheneber er man ’gins to
fall back on his ’ligion, I know he’ll do ter watch. ’Sides dat, I nurver
did b’lieve in bein’ too active in ercomplishin’ er thing when and gib
you de proceeds. Somepin’ in Torm’s talk made me know he wuz gwine at dat
berry hawg, so dat night I hid out in de bushes whar he hed ter pass, an’
sho nuff, ’bout midnight heah he come wid dat mud-lark on his back, all
done scraped an’ cleaned fer de mess. When he got close ernuff I riz up
an’ sez:

“‘Halt! Who goes dar?’

“I seed he thort he’d run inter er Yankee picket, an’ I pulled my
gun—bang! bang! bang! Lord, you orter seed ’im drap dat hawg an’ come
out’n de woods lak de ole gray hoss a-tearin’ down de wilderness. I tuck
de hawg an’ put ’im in our chist, an’ de naix day Torm got me off,
lookin’ mighty mournful, an’ ’lowed he wuz mouty nigh starved. Sez he,
sheepishly.

“‘Brer Rube, arter I lef’ you, I prayed ober de thing, an’ de angel tole
me whar I’d fin’ a fat mud-lark. I bagged ’im in good fashion an’ wuz
comin’ home wid ’im when I run inter de whole Yankee army an’ come mouty
nigh bein’ kilt, an’ den an’ dar I drapt de purties’ mud-lark dat ever
sung in de cane-brakes.’

“Sez I: ‘Brer Torm, arter I lef’ you, I prayed ober de situation too, an’
I tole de angel I wuz crippled an’ c’u’dn’ do much myse’f, but dat I wuz
mouty hungry an’ wanted a mud-lark. De righteous am nurver fursaken,’ sez
I, ’an’ dat night he made a fool nigger go out an’ fotch me one to my
very door.’

“I gin Torm a shoulder,’ laughed the old man, ’an’ he nurver talked no
mo’ ’ligion ter me dat yeah.

“But ter show yer jes whut kin’ uv er furrager I kin be when I gits my
han’ in,” he went on, “a week or so arter dat, we got clean out, an’
I went out ter git somepin ter eat. I c’u’dn’t fin’ nuffin but some
bee hives in a farmyard. Wall, I wuz ez handy wid bees ez I wuz wid
mud-larks, an’ de nex’ mawnin’ fo’ gallons ob lubly honey wuz in de
haidquarters mess chists.

“De ole farmer raised Cain when he foun’ it out, an’ heah he come down
to haidquarters nex’ mawnin to tell de majah. Wall, de majah, he tells
de colonel, an’ de colonel he gits mouty mad. He draws de reg’ment up
an’ makes ’em er speech, an’ he sez, sezee: ‘Enny man dat’ll rob his
countryman am worse dan er dawg;’ an’ ef he c’u’d fin’ de man whut robbed
de ole man’s bee-gums he’d hang ’im up by de thum’s. Wall, sur, he talked
on twel he git so patriotic he issues er sarch warrant. De fust chist
dey went in wuz his’n, an dar sot fo’ gallons ob lubly honey. De colonel
looked dum’-founded at de majah, an’ de majah looked jes ez nachul at de
colonel, an’ de ole farmer he looked lak he done los’ all ’spect he hed
fer de Sudern Confedercy, and den de colonel, he sez ter de majah:

“‘Majah,’ sezee; ‘whyn’t yer tell me ole Rube wuz out furragin las’
night? I’d nurver let you issue dat d— little sarch warrant.’”

       *       *       *       *       *

The opportunities of the Florence of to-day fills one with wonder
and enthusiasm. Here, where once were woods, is a growing city, its
manufactories covering the banks of a noble stream, which, with the
two greatest railroads in the South—the Louisville & Nashville and the
Southern—give it rates and an opportunity unsurpassed anywhere. It is
as sure to be a great city as men are to see and hear. Here is the
opportunity of a life for any young man who wishes to till the land or to
build factories or stores.

But this part of it is all better told by Mr. Sweetland in another
chapter herein, and I desist.—Ed. Trotwood.




Florence As It Was in 1820.

By ANNE ROYAL.


    (The following account of Florence, written two years after the
    town was laid off, will be interesting to all.—Ed.)

Florence is one of the new towns of this beautiful and rapid rising
State. It is happily situated for commerce at the head of steamboat
navigation, on the north side of the Tennessee River, in the county of
Lauderdale, five miles below the port of the Mussel Shoals, and ten miles
from the line of the State of Tennessee.

Florence is to be the great emporium of the northern part of this State.
I do not see why it should not; it has a great capital and is patronized
by the wealthiest gentlemen in the State. It has a great State at its
back; another in front, and a noble river on all sides, the steamboats
pouring every necessary and every luxury into its lap. Its citizens,
bold, enterprising, and industrious—much more so than any I have seen in
the State.

Many large and elegant brick buildings are already built here, (although
it was sold out, but two years since), and frame houses are putting up
daily. It is not uncommon to see a framed building begun in the morning
and finished by night.

Several respectable mercantile houses are established here, and much
business is done on commission also. The site of the town is beautifully
situated on an eminence, commanding an extensive view of the surrounding
country and Tennessee River, from which it is three-quarters of a mile
distant. It has two springs of excellent and never failing water.
Florence has communication by water with Mississippi, Missouri,
Louisiana, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Kentucky, West Pennsylvania, West
Virginia and East Tennessee, and very shortly will communicate with
the Eastern States, through the great canal. The great military road
that leads from Nashville to New Orleans, by way of Lake Ponchartrain,
passes through this town, a number of people who travel through it, and
the numerous droves of horses from the lower country, for market, are
incredible. Florence contains one printing press, and publishes a paper
weekly called the Florence Gazette; it is ably patronized, and edited
by one of our first men, and said to be the best paper in the State.
Florence is inhabited by people from almost all parts of Europe and the
United States; here are English, Irish, Welsh, Scotch, French, Dutch,
Germans and Grecians. The first Greek I ever saw was in this town. I
conversed with him on the subject of his country, but found him grossly
ignorant. He butchers for the town, and has taken to his arms a mullatto
woman for a wife. He very often takes an airing on horseback of a Sunday
afternoon, with his wife, riding by his side, and both arrayed in shining
costumes.

The river at Florence is upwards of five hundred yards wide; it is
ferried in a large boat worked by four horses, and crosses in a few
minutes.

There are two large and well kept taverns in Florence, and several
doggeries. A doggery is a place where spiritous liquors are sold; and
where men get drunk, quarrel and fight, as often as they choose, but
where there is nothing to eat for man or beast. Did you ever hear
anything better named. “I swear!” said a Yankee pedler, one day, with
both his eyes bunged up, “that are doggery be rightly named. Never seed
the like on’t. If I get to hum agin it’l be a nice man’l catch me in
these here parts. Awfullest place one could be at.” It appeared the
inmates of the doggery enticed him under pretense of buying his wares,
and forced him to drink; and then forced him to fight; but the poor
little Yankee was sadly beaten. Not content with blackening his eyes,
they overturned his tin cart, and scattered his tins to the forewinds,
frightened his horse and tormented his very soul out about lasses, etc.
He was a laughable object, but to hear his dialect in laying off the law,
was a complete farce, particularly when Pat came to invite him into the
same doggery to drink friends: “I ben’t a dog to go into that are dog
house.”

The people, you see, know a thing or two, here; they call things by their
right names. But to proceed. There may be about one hundred dwelling
houses and stores, a court house, and several warehouses in Florence.
The latter are, however, on the river. One of the longest buildings I
ever saw is in Florence. It was built by a company of gentlemen, and is
said to have cost ninety thousand dollars, and is not yet finished. The
proprietors, being of this place, are men of immense wealth, and are
pushing their capital with great foresight and activity. For industry and
activity, Florence outstrips all the northern towns in the State. More
people travel this road than all our western roads put together. I was
just going to conclude, when an old German passing through my room, from
that of my landlady’s, made me laugh, in reply to something uttered by
the lady, he said: “Poverty was no crime, when came honestly by it.”

More of Florence. I observed in my last, the surprising wealth of this
place. The principal gentlemen of wealth are General Coffee, James
Jackson, Esq., Major McKinley (now a Senator in Congress from Alabama),
and Messrs. Simpson and Gaither. Of these J. Jackson is said to be not
only wealthy, but the wealthiest man in the State. There are, however,
many others quite easy in their circumstances. General Coffee, and J.
Jackson live out of town. Major McKinley lives in Florence, and is
reputed to be the first lawyer in the three States. He is a stout, fine
looking man; of easy manners, as all gentlemen are; and his dwelling
contains more taste and splendor, by one-half, than I ever saw in my
whole life put together. But this is nothing. Mrs. McKinley, the elegance
of her manners, and the sweetness of her conversation, joined with her
interesting children, completely disconcerted me. Everything in the
house had, to me, the appearance of enchantment. I never was in such a
paradise before. Mrs. McKinley looked as though she had dropped from
above. I never was more confounded. And the children. They are truly a
pattern. The dear little things were in the nursery, and hearing there
was a stranger in the parlor, prevailed on the nurse to open the door, a
few inches, that they might see who was there, but they were instantly
upbraided by their mother. Make these a pattern for your children, if
you should have any. I begged admission for the dear creatures, and they
were admitted upon condition of good behavior. They were the handsomest
children I ever beheld, and I was so completely fascinated by their
manners, I forget every thing else. Mrs. McKinley informed me she was
from Philadelphia, and was acquainted with Mrs. Dr. Charles Lewis.

All the ladies of Florence excel in the domestic virtues. No gadding
abroad. They demean themselves with that modesty and attention to their
domestic affairs, beyond any ladies I have seen in the State. Mrs. Coffee
(a niece of Mrs. General Jackson), comes to preaching in a plain bonnet
and calico dress. General Coffee was here since I arrived, and appears to
be much reduced since I saw him in Huntsville. His constitution was much
injured by the hardships he suffered in the army. I was never in speaking
of James Jackson. It is said he is a native of Ireland. Mrs. Ward, Mrs.
Gibson and Mrs. Southworth, the printer’s wife, and several others, are
charming women. Captain Gibson, a son of the brave Colonel Gibson, of
Tennessee, is one of the most amiable men on earth.

It is unaccountable why such a number of physicians should flock into
this country. Every town is flooded with them. They are strung along the
roads like so many blacksmith’s shops. You can either walk or ride, but
you have a physician on each side, one in front, and one in rear. Here
are seven in Florence, seven more went away for want of room. There are
also here, six lawyers. I left thirteen doctors in Courtland, a much
smaller place. One hundred passed through the latter, south, unable to
get in. You cannot, as I stated before, travel a mile on any great road,
without meeting with a doctor’s shop. But this is not all. Almost every
practising doctor has three or four students. I have known mechanics quit
their trade and commence the study of medicine.




[Illustration: Florence, Alabama

THE COMING CITY OF THE SOUTH]


In writing the story of Florence, it is our intention to do it in a
different way from the usual method of writing such stories. Trotwood’s
Monthly is known as the magazine that is “Different” and we want to be
that way. The fact that “John Smith came here in 1869, commenced farming
under innumerable disadvantages, was married on February 5, 1874 to
Miss Mary Jones, and that the union was blessed with several children,
and that his sterling worth as a citizen and business man, is highly
appreciated, etc., etc.,” may be gratifying to the vanity of John Smith,
but does it help Florence? We think not, and will, therefore, write the
story in a “Different” way.

[Illustration: Old Lauderdale County Courthouse, 1822-1900.]

The history of Florence from the day of the Moundbuilders has been told
in this issue by Mr. John Trotwood Moore, in his “Southern Travels.” It
is our intention only to tell of the commercial advantages, and tell it
without any “hot air” attachments. Probably the most interesting story
to be told in connection with Florence at the present time is the story
of Mussel Shoals, for what it means to Florence, no one at this time can
tell. If it is true that the waste waters of the great canal are to be
harnessed, and electricity transmitted to the surrounding territory, it
simply means that “Greater Florence” will be the leading city of Alabama,
and one of the leading cities of the entire South. The story of Mussel
Shoals has been written, and appears in this number, and the main stem
of the story is facts. We prefer to allow our readers to form their own
conclusions as to the result, but it is easy enough to see that it will
mean the present Florence will give way to the Greater Florence, and
rank with the best Southern cities. We would not be dealing in facts if
we tried to convey the idea that Florence alone is to be benefitted by
this contemplated improvement, for it means that the surrounding country
and the neighboring town and cities will also reap their share of the
prosperity incidental to this improvement.

Florence is an ideal place for a home. It is much easier to tell what
they have not got, than to tell of the many advantages. There is an
abundance of pure water, an ideal climate, good schools, good society, an
abundance of the most beautiful scenery to be found anywhere and if there
is any disadvantages around Florence from the standpoint of its being
a desirable place to live, we failed to discover it. The price of real
estate in Florence, as compared with values quoted elsewhere, is below
the average. A more desirable home can be bought in Florence for the
money than can be bought most any place else in the South. Florence has
more modern homes that are up-to-date in architecture than many places
twice the size. Every street shows the progressiveness of the citizens in
building homes that are a credit to Florence and to Northern Alabama.

[Illustration: Lauderdale County Courthouse, Florence, Ala.]

Two live newspapers cover the local field thoroughly, and they are not
spending any time slinging muddy editorials at each other, but are
interested in the development of Florence, and both are a credit to the
city. Their equipment is superior to that found in many offices twice the
size, and their columns are bright and full of the latest news.

When a manufacturer investigates with a view to locating, he invariably
asks: “What are the banking facilities?” Florence can well be proud of
her banks, and a glance at their advertisements herein will tell the
story. The First National has stood the test of time, and the Alabama
Trust and Savings Bank show by their deposits that they have the entire
confidence of the people, for they are but a few months old. These banks
are safe and reliable, conservative and up-to-date.

Florence is noted for her educational institutions, and with the best
graded schools and colleges can offer more in the way of educational
features than many cities of larger size.

Florence has transportation advantages that place her in a commanding
position, and with competition from two railroads and the Tennessee
River, and with other railroads under consideration, is placed in close
touch with the markets of the world.

There is probably no city in the United States that enjoys better
advantages than Florence as a manufacturing point. Competing railroads
and river transportation, cheap fuel, cheap labor, right at the door of
one of the biggest furnaces in the South, they are able to get the best
grade of iron at a very low cost, and without the usual transportation
charges added.

Lumber in abundance, and right at the door of the best coal mines in
the South. Cheap power is one of the essential features of a successful
manufacturing point, and even with the present conditions to say nothing
of the Mussel Shoals improvement, it places Florence ahead of most any
city in the South as a manufacturing center.

As an example of the advantages of locating a manufacturing plant in
Florence we will cite the case of the Stove Foundry. They are at the
very door of the Philadelphia Furnace, and have in many cases had
deliveries of iron on two hours’ notice—sometimes less. Now comes the
point: Detroit is one of the greatest stove manufacturing cities in the
United States. Records show that pig iron is being shipped from Florence
to Detroit, and that finished stoves are being shipped from Detroit to
Florence. Labor is cheaper in Florence than in Detroit. Fuel is cheaper,
water is cheaper, and in fact everything is cheaper. The Florence
foundries can make and ship a finished casting to northern points for
the same rate the raw material can be shipped, and yet a great deal of
the finished product finds its way back to Florence and points further
South. There are a thousand arguments in favor of Florence, and none
against her. Everything is better and conditions are better in every way.
The climate is elegant, scenery sublime, and one of the most healthy
locations in the United States.

[Illustration: Jefferson Hotel, Florence, Ala.]

A story of Florence without mention of their excellent street railway
would not be complete. The Sheffield Company operate a line of cars
between Florence, Sheffield and Tuscumbia, that are strictly up-to-date,
and the same attention is paid to the wants of the people as though
they were compelled to fight an aggressive competitor for every fare.
These cars connect the L. & N. and Southern depots, and give Florence
a service that they are proud of and appreciate. There is a friendly
rivalry existing between the cities of Florence, Sheffield and Tuscumbia,
as there always is when towns are located close together, and to ask a
man in Sheffield what he thought of Florence, he would look as though he
never heard of the place, and to ask a man in Florence what he thought
of Sheffield, he would say that any man living in Sheffield when he
could just as well live in Florence should be fined and imprisoned on
suspicion, but in dividing his favors in the way of street car service,
Mr. J. W. Worthington, the Vice President and active man, is impartial,
and gives all three cities a service that is strictly first-class.

The Sheffield Company also furnish electric lights and power to Florence,
and are daily improving the service and extending their wires.

Florence could well be called a “City of Schools and Churches,” for in
that respect they are far above the average city. Their schools, as
before mentioned, are of the highest order, and their churches represent
all denominations. There is the Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Trinity
Episcopal, Catholic and Christian. The people are unusually devoted to
the churches, and contribute liberally to their support.

Florence now has approximately three miles of cement sidewalks and is
now advertising for bids for the construction of twenty-seven miles
additional. Florence will use something like ten million brick within the
next few months, as several large buildings are now being constructed and
the plans are being drawn for many more.

[Illustration: Philadelphia Furnace, Florence, Ala., owned by
Sloss-Sheffield Co. Daily capacity, 200 tons. Employs 175 men.]

Florence now has industries that represent a money investment of about
one and a half million dollars, fine schools and churches, street
railway, electric lights and gas, honest city government, an up-to-date
and efficient fire department, police protection, telegraph, telephones,
public parks, and in fact everything required to make it a desirable
place to engage in business and to reside. It will welcome new industries
and good citizens. It is in need of various industries to use the waste
material from the wagon works, stave factories and planing mills, and can
offer greater inducements to parties interested than any other city in
the South.

       *       *       *       *       *

It would be unfair to this intelligent city, filled, as it is, with
schools, colleges and churches, not to make mention of its valuable
library.

Since its inception in 1885 it has continued to furnish to the reading
public of Florence the best literature, consisting of prose and poetry,
history, science and fiction.

There are more than 2,000 volumes, well shelved and properly cared for.
The library, while not entirely free, is open to all, and intended for
all. One day of every week books can be procured and a membership fee of
$1.00 per year is charged, this amount being used for the purchase of the
new books, a stipulated sum being spent each year for historical works
and reference books for students.

The books are carefully selected when purchased, there being a special
book committee charged with this duty. The library is under the direction
of twelve lady directors, selected for their special fitness for the
work. They are:

Mrs. Erister Ashcraft, President; Mrs. John R. Price, Vice President;
Mrs. Emmet O’Neal, Secretary; Mrs. L. M. Humphries, Treasurer; Mrs. W. P.
Campbell, Mrs. C. E. Jordan, Mrs. H. B. Lee, Miss Nettie Simpson, Mrs. M.
W. Cample, Mrs. M. C. Nelson, Mrs. L. B. Frierson, Mrs. G. N. Smith.

       *       *       *       *       *

MUSSEL SHOALS.

By Erister Ashcraft.

In the future development of the resources of Florence and her
surrounding territory, a new and powerful factor must be taken into
consideration. It is only a matter of a short time when the hitherto
wasted energy of Mussel Shoals will be harnessed into a power, second
only to that of Niagara.

[Illustration: MUSSEL SHOALS CANAL.

Aqueduct. 900 feet long.

Aqueduct spanning Shoals Creek.

Lock 9, where Mussel Shoals Canal opens into Tennessee River.]

Much has been written concerning these immense falls, but it is the
purpose of this article to give only such facts as will be of interest
and practical use to prospective developers of this great power, and to
those who are to help build up this beautiful valley into one of the
busiest manufacturing centers in the United States.

In a general way the value and importance of this great power is
expressed by one of the ablest American engineers who has examined and
surveyed these shoals: “There is no place in the world where greater
advantages are to be found for the harnessing of water power for the uses
of industry, or where there is greater power awaiting development within
reach of the seaboard by water and by rail transportation than Mussel
Shoals.”

The following, from the report of Chief Engineer F. H. Newell, and
incorporated by Senator Morgan in his recent report to the Senate on the
“Navigation of the Tennessee River,” is reproduced here as being the most
accurate and authentic account of the various important features of the
Mussel Shoals with reference to their capacity for developing power:

“In the Tennessee river, in the vicinity of Florence, Ala., are several
shoals capable of the development of power.

“The shoals are a succession of cascades, amid many islands, in a river
bed varying in width from a half-mile to three miles. The difference
between high and low water is only five or six feet, corresponding to a
rise of fifty feet at Chattanooga. Beginning at Brown’s Ferry, twelve
miles below Decatur, Ala., the river has the following falls:

[Illustration: FIG. 9—Map showing shoals in Tennessee River near
Florence.]

“From Brown’s Ferry to the mouth of Elk river the fall is twenty-six
feet in eleven miles. This is known as ‘Elk River Shoals.’ Its most
precipitous part is at the lower end, where there is a fall of 16.5 feet
in about four miles.

“From the mouth of Elk river to the head of Mussel Shoals, a distance of
five miles, there is a fall of only two feet.

“From the head of Mussel Shoals to Bainbridge the fall is eighty-five
feet in seventeen miles, and is known as ‘Mussel Shoals.’

“From Bainbridge to Florence the fall is twenty-three feet in seven
miles, and is known as ‘Little Mussel Shoals.’

“From Florence to the head of Colbert Shoals the fall is three feet in
eleven miles.

“From the head of Colbert Shoals to Waterloo is, therefore, 160 feet in
a distance of fifty-seven miles. Sixteen miles of the distance, however,
has a fall of only five feet, leaving a fall of 155 feet in forty-one
miles that cover the four shoals mentioned. The shoals are really more
precipitous than the foregoing figures would indicate. For instance, 84.6
feet of the fall at Mussel Shoals is in a distance of fourteen miles.”

The general surface of the water on these shoals is comparatively smooth
and of even depth in its levels across the river, with no deep fissures
to interfere with the building of dams at any location that may be
selected. The islets and projecting rocks can be taken into the structure
of the dams at a considerable advantage in the cost of such works.

The bed and banks of the river are only subject to slight changes, and
improvements, when made, are therefore practically permanent.

[Illustration: MUSSEL SHOALS CANAL.

Lock 7, looking down Canal.

Arch Bridge at Lock 6.

Lock 4.]

This section of the Tennessee river runs through a fertile and beautiful
upland, presenting on both shores bluffs or rock of strong texture that
afford very extensive and excellent quarries for all structural purposes,
while the rocks for the rougher work of dam construction are abundantly
supplied in the bed of the river. These bluffs break away into beautiful
farm lands, and the high lands and salubrious climate insure healthful
homes.

Directly tributary are all the elements necessary for a great
manufacturing center.

The nearby iron, coal and phosphate fields are among the richest in
the world, and the supply of lime- and sandstone for manufacturing and
building purposes is inexhaustible. Forests of timber of both hard and
soft woods of every description are near at hand, and bordering the river
banks from Chattanooga to Johnsonville are the most productive cotton
fields of the South. Labor is skilled and plentiful.

It has been impossible to develop this great power heretofore, as the
government has refused to allow the construction of dams across the
river, but by the recent Act of Congress such permission has been granted.

With the immense supply of raw material of every kind in this section,
sufficient manufacturing industries may be added here to consume
the power generated from these shoals, making us the most important
manufacturers of wood, iron, cotton, etc., in the United States.

Estimated minimum net horsepower of Tennessee river in Alabama on
turbines realizing eighty per cent. of the theoretical power:

    ---------------------+------+-------------+-------------
    LOCALITY             |Fall  |Minimum      |Minimum
                         |      |net power in |net power in
                         |      |driest years |average years
    ---------------------+------+-------------+-------------
                         |Ft.   |             |
    Elk River Shoals     | 26   | 15,600      | 30,550
    Mussel Shoals        | 85   | 51,000      | 99,875
    Little Mussel Shoals | 23   | 13,800      | 27,025
    Colbert Shoals       | 21   | 12,600      | 24,675
                         +------+-------------+-------------
      Total              |155   | 93,000      |182,125
    ---------------------+------+-------------+-------------

       *       *       *       *       *

When the present general manager of the Tennessee Valley Fertilizer
Company started in business some seven years ago, his stock in trade
consisted of plenty of pluck and a hoe. With the assistance of one man,
he mixed his fertilizer with a hoe, and the first day’s output was eleven
bags of fertilizer. The first week showed up a total of 55 bags. Without
telling of the seven years of hard and persistent work, will say that any
of the eight mills in this plant to-day can mix as much fertilizer in
twenty minutes as they did the first week. There is probably no brand of
fertilizer sold to-day in any market that gives more satisfaction than
their famous “Tiger” brand, for in this formula is represented the very
best work of the general manager, who has given practically every hour of
his time to the upbuilding of the business, and his motto is: “The Very
Best That Can be Produced.”

The company own their own phosphate fields in Maury and Hickman counties,
Tennessee, and daily receive shipments of the raw material, where it is
quickly converted into their forty different brands. “King Cotton Grower”
is probably their most popular seller, as it is especially adapted to the
growing of cotton, and no expense has been spared to make it perfect,
and as imitation is a sure sign of superiority, the company have been
compelled upon several occasions to fight for their rights to use this
name for their product. No better recommendation for their goods could
be given than the fact that their very best customers and friends are
the ones that started to buy their goods when the company was first
organized, and who have continued to stand by them in their fight to give
the people the very best. They make a special study of the needs of the
farmer, and make their formulas accordingly, and while it is safe to say
that it would be hard to improve on their different brands, which are
all made with scientific accuracy, yet they are always ready to make any
special formulas, and will take such orders and deliver them promptly.

Growing to such proportions in such few years and fighting the trust at
the same time is certainly a record that could not be built on anything
but honest principles and meritorious goods.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Florence Wagon Works was established in 1882 in Atlanta, Ga. Was
reorganized and moved to Florence, Ala., in 1889, and has been in
constant operation since that time.

During the twelve years ending with 1905, this company has manufactured
and distributed over 89,000 farm wagons, paying to its employees for
labor and salary something over $797,000. The volume of business has
been considerably more than $3,000,000. During that time it has paid to
the railroads more than $200,000 for freight. These figures will give an
approximate idea of the extent of business done by this institution.

It is in the heart of the very best supply of hard wood for wagon
purposes. Being situated only across the river from the large furnaces
and rolling mills of Sheffield it is enabled to secure its supply of iron
under the most favorable conditions.

[Illustration: FLORENCE WAGON WORKS.

Fellow Shed, Florence Wagon Works.

View from top of paint shop.

Lane in box board yard.]

The entire factory is equipped with the most modern machinery for
manufacturing and handling its large output, which is growing in
popularity every year and the territory covered is being extended
annually, now reaching from Virginia to Mexico, and from the Atlantic
coast to the far West.

       *       *       *       *       *

One of the most interesting features of Florence, is the Cypress Creek
dam, on the land of Mr. F. M. Perry. There is a great opportunity for
the development of sufficient electric power to supply the needs of
Florence, and taking the figures of a prominent surveyor at Florence,
it is estimated that this dam will furnish something like 12,000 horse
power daily. The owner is reluctant to make any statement as to the
possibilities, but prefers to let those interested investigate. We print
herein a picture of the old dam that was in use before the war, and the
present owner started to rebuild it some time ago, but before it was
completed, a heavy rise washed away a part of it and he has made no
further progress. The creek makes a big bend, and while it is some three
miles around, by tunnelling through some 600 feet, it will give a fall
of thirty feet, and by building a dam at the site of the present dam, or
rather by finishing the one partly constructed, elevating it ten feet,
it will back the water of Cypress Creek to a point where a tunnel of 300
feet will give a forty foot fall, and will discharge at the point shown
in the second picture of the old cotton factory that was destroyed during
the war, and which was never rebuilt. There is something like 1,000
acres of land with this privilege and to sum the whole thing up, taking
the estimate made by City Engineer Major A. G. Negley, as a basis, an
expenditure of $2,000 to finish the dam, $6,000 for the tunnel and $2,000
for the turbine would give electricity to furnish power enough to meet
all the demands of Florence and the surrounding country.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

Before the war there were three dams practically in sight of each other
that furnished the power for a grist mill and two cotton factories.

For further information, address the owner, F. M. Perry, Florence,
Alabama.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Illustration]

The Manual Training Department of the Alabama State Normal under the
supervision of Prof. F. T. Nisbet, is one of the most interesting
parts of Florence. Mr. Nisbet is a graduate of Atheneum and Mechanics
Institute, Rochester, N. Y., and was at the head of manual training in
the city schools of Yonkers, N. Y. He introduced manual training in the
University of Alabama where he taught for two years at the summer school
for teachers. It enables a pupil to demonstrate their ideas, and tends to
develop the ability to express their thoughts in many ways. The Manual
Training Department in Florence ranks with the very best in the country.

       *       *       *       *       *

ASHCRAFT COTTON FACTORY.

It is hard to say anything of interest in regard to this institution
other than what is stated in their advertisement. It was organized in
1900 with a capital stock of $100,000, which was increased the following
year to $150,000. Their goods are in such demand that they are several
months behind on orders, and, as stated, in their advertisement, are
the first company in the United States to use the entire product of
the cotton field. The factory contains 6,240 spindles and 200 looms,
employing several hundred hands. The factory is one of the best equipped
and most up-to-date factories in the United States, and the fact that
their product is sold for several months ahead is conclusive evidence
that their goods are of unusual merit. C. W. Ashcraft is President and
General Manager, John T. Ashcraft, Vice President, and Erister Ashcraft,
Secretary and Treasurer.

       *       *       *       *       *

The two accompanying pictures of “Light Running Florence” wagons tell
more than could be told in several pages.

[Illustration]

The 3½ Florence Wagon that brought a load of 86 people to the fair at
Murfreesboro, carried an estimated weight of 13,000 pounds, or six times
as much as the ordinary farmer hauls at a load. The ordinary log wagon
is seldom called on to hold up a load to exceed four or five thousand
pounds, and oftener less, yet the “Light Running Florence” managed to
carry a solid stone base weighing 22,000 pounds, and without injury to
the wagon in any way. There must be a reason for this. If the wagons were
built to conform with the claims of the Florence Wagon Works, as to the
amount of tonnage capacity, they would certainly not be misleading the
public or the purchaser, but when a wagon will carry more than five times
as much as they claim it will, and ten times as much as the ordinary
farmer wants to haul, there is but one answer; the wagon is built on
honor. It would be pretty hard to get anything but an honest wagon from
this factory, for unless a man be honest with himself, he could not be
honest with his employer, and the record for industry, temperance, and
general citizenship is certainly broken when you investigate the class
of men that make these wagons. Many of the employes own their own homes,
contribute liberally to churches and charity and patronize the schools,
and a larger Sunday school class can be found from the children of this
industrious lot of people than can be found most anywhere, considering
the number of employes. There is not a “boozefighter” in their employ,
and the standard of manhood and citizenship is certainty commendable.

[Illustration: _3½ FLORENCE WAGON CARRYING A LOAD OF 86 PASSENGERS,
ESTIMATED WEIGHT 13,000 LBS._]

       *       *       *       *       *

The Ashcraft Oil Mills is one of the tributary industries of the Ashcraft
Cotton Mills, where the by-products are handled, and is under the same
management. In addition they operate several gins in the territory
adjacent to Florence, to insure an adequate supply of seed for the
manufacture of their product. Several years ago when there was little
or no demand for cotton seed hulls, they advertised that they would for
a limited time give away absolutely free their output of cotton seed
hulls that the farmers and stock raisers might learn of its value as a
feed. It was rather hard at first to give them away, but it resulted in
creating a demand until now the entire output is sold with little or no
advertising.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Illustration]

We print on this page the picture of Hon. Emmet O’Neal, and his beautiful
residence in Florence. Mr. O’Neal is a candidate for the nomination for
Lieutenant Governor. He is a son of the late Governor O’Neal, and it is
only fitting that he should in time succeed his illustrious father. Mr.
O’Neal is best liked where best known, and if the people of Florence
were the only ones to be consulted his election would be unanimous. He
is a native of Lauderdale County, and has always been a prominent factor
in the Democratic affairs of the State. His residence, known as the old
Foster home, on North Court street, is one of the old historic landmarks,
and one of the finest homes in Florence.

[Illustration]

       *       *       *       *       *

Our advertisers represent the progressive business firms of Florence, and
while we did not secure assistance from all of the business houses in
Florence by any means, we certainly have reasons to be proud of our list.
Florence has a hundred other business firms not mentioned herein. There
are several wholesale houses, numerous retail stores that are a credit
to any town, and, in fact, everything necessary to make up a first-class
city, including hotels, restaurants, drug stores, livery stables, etc.,
foundries, machine shops, ice factory, steam laundry, etc., etc.

       *       *       *       *       *

“Say what you please about us,” said Mr. J. W. Worthington, “but tell it
just as you see it. State the facts, and we will stand by you. Charge me
up with my part of the expense to advertise Florence, and send me the
bill.” Is it a wonder that Florence is growing when the people interested
in her future are willing to open their pocketbook and do not ask for
anything to be said about them but the truth?

       *       *       *       *       *

Rogers Bros. have used more space to advertise Florence than they have
to advertise their own business. It is said that either of the brothers
will go without his meals to do something that will benefit Florence.
They own some stock in practically every industry in Florence, and will
take stock in new industries.

       *       *       *       *       *

Picture of Patton School at Florence, Alabama, and of Miss Freda Bose,
who won the gold medal offered by the Florence Chapter, U. D. C., for the
best essay on the subject, “The Reconstruction Period.” The Patton School
was erected in 1890, at a cost of something over $22,000. Miss Bose is
a daughter of John Bose, General Agent of the L. & N. Railroad, and is
thirteen years old.

[Illustration]

       *       *       *       *       *

Notes of Florence.

Read the ad of Tennessee Valley Fertilizer Co.—From a hoe and one man to
a business requiring the investment of $150,000 in less than ten years,
and still growing.

F. M. Perry in talking of his Cypress Creek property says: “Don’t say a
word that we can’t substantiate.” We have given facts alone. Investigate
if you are interested.

Read the advertisement of the Florence Wagon Works. It is interesting
even if you never expect to buy a wagon.

Mr. Percy Jones, the President of Cherry Cotton Mills, said: “There is
nothing we care to advertise, at least from our own mills, as we do not
sell to the consumer, but we run our card in order that we may help to
advertise Florence.” This is the spirit that makes a city grow.

Parties coming to Florence can depend on getting all the comforts of
home at The Jefferson. The manager is a practical hotel man, and can
adapt himself to circumstances. His chef quit a short time ago, and
Mr. Negley cooked the breakfast. The only difference noticeable was an
improvement.

“Don’t use any space telling about me,” said Mr. Richardson, of the Acme
Lumber Company. “What we want is to advertise Florence, and it you have
anything nice to say, say it about our growing little city. I am willing
to pay my part; don’t wish any personal bouquets.”

The Alabama Stove Company sell more goods than they can make, yet they
cut the conversation short by saying: “We are in for anything that will
help Florence.” Their advertisement is inserted in order that they might
have an excuse for helping to “boost.” Mr. Berger seems to have the habit
of “boosting” on the slightest provocation.

It you are interested in Florence, or wish to know anything about
Florence, we publish the advertisement of the representative real estate
firms, and we can assure you that facts are their main assets. Write them
for information.

A visit to the Temple Planing Mill reminded us of the story of the fight
between the railroad presidents. The president that owned the small road
remarked that his line might not be as long as the other one, but it was
just as wide. We do not remember ever having seen a busier shop, and they
probably turn out more material in a month than some mills of larger
pretentions.

Florence has three banks.




Anderson-Cathey Co.

(INCORPORATED)

FLORENCE, ALABAMA


Real Estate, Immigration and Rental Agents

Abstractors of land titles in Florence and Lauderdale County. Dealers in
timber and mineral lands, farms and city property.

Issue booklets every four months descriptive of our section of country
and containing lists of lands for sale. These booklets are mailed
extensively throughout the North and West and will be mailed anyone upon
request.



        
            *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TROTWOOD'S MONTHLY, VOL. II, NO. 2, MAY, 1906 ***
        

    

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