1866

Founding of the Ku Klux Klan.

As is often true of historians in this era, Benjamin Andrews (writing in 1896), often reveals an unthinking racism. 

This is particularly noticeable when he discusses the Reconstruction Era: 

Where white men’s aims could not be realized by persuasion or other mild means, resort was had to intimidation and force. The chief instrumentality at first used for keeping colored voters from the polls was the Ku-Klux Klan, a secret society organized in Tennessee in 1866. It sprung from the old night patrol of slavery times. Then, every southern gentleman used to serve on this patrol, whose duty it was to whip severely every negro found absent from home without a pass from his master. Its first post bellum work was not ill meant, and its severities came on gradually. Its greatest activity was in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi, where its awful mysteries and gruesome rights spread utter panic among the superstitious blacks. Men visited negroes’ huts and “mummicked” about, at first with sham magic, not with arms at all. One would carry a flesh bag in the shape of a heart and go around “hollering for fried nigger meat.” Another would put on an India-rubber stomach to startle the negroes by swallowing pailfuls of water. Another represented that he had been killed at Manassas, since which time “some one had built a turnpike over his grave and he had to scratch like h--l to get up through the gravel.” The lodges were “dens,” the members “ghouls.” “Giants,” “goblins,” “titans,” “furies,” “dragons,” and “hydras” were names of different classes among the officers.

 

Usually the mere existence of a “den” anywhere was sufficient to render docile every negro in the vicinity. If more was required, a half-dozen “ghouls,” making their nocturnal rounds in their hideous masks and long white gowns, frightened all but the most hardy. Any who showed fight were whipped, maimed, or killed, treatment which was extended on occasion to their “carpet-bag” and “scalawag” friends – these titles denoting respectively Northern and Southern men who took the negroes’ side. (11/38-39)

 

*

 “Possibilities of curving the ball.” 

During the baseball season of 1866 or 1867 (the pitcher involved in this story could never quite remember), the curveball was invented.

 

William Arthur “Candy” Cummings, had been toying with the idea for some time, having thrown clam shells, and watched how they curved.

 

A number of my chums and I were throwing shells one day in Brooklyn. When seeing a shell take a wide curve I said, “Now, if I could only make the ball do that I think the other clubs won’t be in it.” There was immediately a discussion on the art and possibilities of curving the ball, all hands insisting it was an impossible thing. I took the opposite side of the question and said it could be done. I told him I was going to do it if it took me ten years. This was in ‘64 when I was in my 16th year.

 

At times I would think I had it, and the boys would get behind my catcher and sometimes they would think they saw it and others would say it came straight. They chafed me so much I decided to say nothing to them but work quietly until I got it. I went back to boarding school that fall and every minute I had away from study and recitations I put to pitching. Still I was not sure of it. After I left school in the fall of ‘65 I still kept up working on the one thing. In the meantime I found I could pitch a raise or a drop ball and felt quite encouraged, and determined to stick to it until I got it.

 

During the 1866 season, Cummings went to Boston with his team for a series of games. Pitching against the Harvards, he remembers, if not the exact year,

 

While we were playing the Harvards, I pitched a ball at Archie Bush, and I thought he would bat it out of sight, when, as he struck at the ball, it seemed to go about a foot beyond the end of his bat. I tried again with the same result, and I was then sure I had the curve and have been able to hold onto it ever since.

 

He went on later to pitch in the National League, going 16-8 for Hartford in 1876, and 5-14 for Cincinnati in 1877. But as the inventor of the curveball, despite his losing record, he’s now in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

 

*

 

“Nearly all the southern States passed laws which went far toward reducing the blacks again to slavery.”

June 6: Congress passes the Fourteenth Amendment (which will be adopted by the required number of states two years later, every secessionist state, save Tennessee, rejecting the great amendment).

 

As Benjamin Andrews writes, the problem of what to do with 4,000,000 suddenly free slaves was not helped by Southern intransigence.

 

Worse than this, nearly all the southern States passed laws which went far toward reducing the blacks again to slavery. In Virginia, if a negro broke his labor contract, the employer could pursue him and compel him to work an extra month, with chain and ball if necessary. In Mississippi negro children who were orphans, or whose parents did not support them, were to be apprenticed till they became of age. Their masters could inflict upon them “moderate corporal punishment,” and recapture such as ran away. In South Carolina any negro engaging in business had to pay one hundred dollars yearly as a license. Mechanics were fined ten dollars each a year for prosecuting their trades. No negro could settle in the State without giving bond for his good behavior and support. In Louisiana a farm laborer was required to make a year’s contract; if he failed to work out the time, he could be punished by forced labor upon public works. Not all the new southern legislation was of this savage character, and this itself must be viewed in the light of the fact that the negroes, trained in irresponsibility, were inclined to idleness and theft. But it was nevertheless unjust. In some sections only the interposition of the military and of the Freedmen’s Bureau made life tolerable to the blacks. (IV, 194-195)

Freed from slavery himself, Booker T. Washington later founded Tuskegee,
a school for African Americans. Author's collection.

* 

The State Commissioner for Ohio reports:

 

Over one-third of the teachers employed in the district schools are themselves mere boys and girls being under twenty years of age. The labors of these youthful and inexperienced teachers are largely experimental, and are therefore necessarily detrimental to the public interests to no inconsiderable extent.

 

It is to redress these admitted and most serious evils that the national aid is now solicited. Women already composed two-thirds of the whole number of persons engaged throughout our country teaching youth. … It is a duty which our lawmakers owe to their country to see that these educators are properly trained. (Finley, 234)

 

*

“The Long Drive.”

 

Upton Bushnell leaves Ohio in the spring, believing that cattle selling for $3-4 in the Southwest can be driven north and sold for ten times that price if he can get them to Chicago.

 

One of the men Bushnell hires to help, Perry Case, kept a diary, and in 1926 told his story to a relative. American Heritage covered it as a “Book Selection,” and provided excerpts in a story called, “The Long Drive.”

 

Bushnell, Case and three others he had hired took a riverboat to New Orleans. He was told right off that he wouldn’t be able to buy Texas cattle with greenbacks. “Well,” said one observer of the Texans, “you can’t buy a beef steer with a bushel basket full of greenbacks. Many can’t read or write and can’t tell a one from a twenty. They won’t take paper. You will have to have gold.”

 

Case remembered a cashier at a New Orleans bank bringing out the money “in rolls of gold. My Gawd, we could never have carried silver,” he added. “We went aboard the ship for the night. We always managed, on account of this money, to be all together as much as we could.”

 

Others on the trip were two four-year Union Army veterans, Fred Lewis and Sid Bartlett, and Dick Bear, a bank clerk, who came along for his health. Bartlett, Bushnell and Lewis were seasick once they left New Orleans and headed for Galveston, Texas, and lay in their bunks all during the voyage. “Dick,” Case wrote, “would go to Fred twenty times a day and ask him if he was better just to hear old Fred stutter and spit, ‘O-n-no, b-b-b-by God!’ Oh, he stuttered worse than any man I ever knew. And Dick would just die laughing.”

 

Eventually they landed, and soon after took a rail car for a little Texas town called Millican. The Texas Central wasn’t much of a railroad. (Millican had a population of only 240, as late as 2010.)

 

No grading was done, just ties laid down on the surface. The train ran slowly. Once the train stopped. We didn't understand and looked out, and there was the engineer off buying a pail of berries of some women picking beside of the tracks. We stopped for the passengers to drink at a spring, and we stopped at every ranch. (66)

 

“Yes, we are all right.”

They took rooms at a hotel; but Bushnell was ill. After a bit of conversation, a young woman agreed to switch her room on the first floor for his on the second.

 

The next morning the landlord tapped at our door. Says he, “Is your room alright?”

 

We three, Bushnell, Dick, and me, always slept together when possible, with our heads against the door on account of the money.

 

The landlord couldn’t get in.

 

I says, “Not up yet,” and looked around. “Yes, we are all right.”

 

“Then you are the only ones,” says he. “Everyone in the hotel has been chloroformed and robbed. One of the girls, the one that changed rooms with you, has not come to, yet.”

 

Fred and Bartlett had been robbed with the rest. Sid Bartlett lost thirty dollars. Fred Lewis would never tell how much. (67)

 

Like so many others of that era, Perry Case could reveal a casual racism. Bushnell and his group left the hotel for the open spaces, “where they could not chloroform us.” Bushnell was still ill, so they rode slowly.

 

It was just the end of the rainy season. No rain, but mud in the road to the axles. Oxen lay dead along the road where they had played out from pulling heavy loads in the deep mud. Carts stood stuck in the mud where the drivers had gone off and left them. We got twenty or twenty-five miles by the middle of the afternoon when we came to a plantation house. We liked to put up early because we didn’t want to travel after dark, and we asked to stay all night at the plantation. The man asked us to “sit awhile” and a n****r took our horses.

 

It was an old plantation home just as it had been before the war. The planter’s name was A.J. Moore. He treated us to everything that was the best. We had the first milk and butter that we had had since we arrived in Texas. In the evening when the Negroes came up from the fields there was forty mules and every one had a n****r wench riding. They were singing! Such a concert I never heard.

 

In the morning after breakfast they brought our horses. When we were ready to take leave, Bushnell asked what was our bill? I will never forget how that planter looked. He stared for a long time, then said, “I have never been guilty of taking money from a guest and I won’t start on you.”

 

We hadn’t got that day, oh, maybe three or four miles, when we come across a party of men with a dead man tied on a horse. We said, “What is the matter?”

 

They said they found him up above a little piece, tied to an Osage orange tree with sixteen bullet holes in him. He was a rider from the store at Millican and had took some merchandise from the store to the little store up above. Someone thought he had some money. He never carried any, but someone had thought so and shot him with sixteen bullet holes.

 

By April 26, the party had reached the Brazos River, where Bushnell bought 700 head of cattle from a rancher named McCabe. McCabe agreed to provide experienced cowhands for the first leg of the drive. The editor for American Heritage notes, “Much of that instruction, however, consisted of riding the ‘greenhorn Yanks’ through the thorny chaparral, or trying to get them lost.” (67)

“Go for him Jack – don’t let a tenderfoot clean you up!”

 

The Yankee “cowboys” kept hearing tales about a desperado named Texas Jack. One night, Case and Bear were sitting in the dining room of a bar and heard that Jack was heading their way. One of their first nights in Texas they had heard gunshots and were told that Texas Jack had killed another man, and done so with impunity.

 

Now Case explained,

 

I recalled the man that was shot crying out three times in death and I looked over a Dick and he was white as a sheet. I said, “Dick, you will have to control yourself and get some color in your face.” Dick was always that way. With any fight he turned pale, but when the fighting began he was there with the best of them.

 

I figured then just how things would happen. Jack would come in the bar room with a gun in each hand. I knowed, for I heard tell, he’d kick the door open with his foot so’s both hands was free. That was the way he always did. Then I took my gun out of the holster and put the flap inside. I pushed the holster around in front of my hip bone. I cocked the revolver and put it in the holster carefully so that I could get to the trigger quick and easy. By this time I had gained some skill in shooting from the hip without moving my arm, by this way taking anyone unawares. Then I pulled my large red bandana handkerchief out as if I was wiping my hands. It would not be unnatural for one coming out from eating and unaware of danger to be wiping his hands on his handkerchief. I was careful though that I was using only one corner and the rest was hanging down in front of my gun. I was being careful also that my right hand should be free when I should need it.

 

We heard Jack fling open the door into the bar room and let out a yell: “Everybody to the bar for drinks.” We heard shots follow and falling glass and we knew he had shot the tops off the bottles. We heard scuffling of feet and knew that everyone was at the bar.

 

I nodded to Dick, and we got up and walk toward the barroom door. The door was open between the rooms, and we started across the other side of the room to the outside door when Jack spied us.

 

“Hello, stranger,” he said. “Come up and have a drink.”

 

“No sir,” I said, “I am not a drinking man.”

 

“The hell you ain’t. You can dance then, can’t you?” With these words he whipped out his revolver and fired at my feet. With the flash of his revolver I had mine and fired. His revolver dropped to the floor. The blood spurted from his finger and he was so surprised he did not seem to notice it. A more surprised man I never hope to see. He looked at me and said, “Who the hell are you?”

 

Says I, “A tenderfoot.”

 

“You are the first man that ever got the drop on Texas Jack,” he said, and stood pale and still, white as a sheet, expecting another shot, which according to the rules I had a right to take and shoot the man down in cold blood.

 

Says I, “You had better attend to that finger.”

 

A man hollered out of the crowd, “Go for him Jack – don’t let a tenderfoot clean you up!”

 

Jack stood just where he had stood all the time looking at me. He was young and good-looking, with good clothes. He said slowly, “I’ll ask you now if you have ever seen as quick as shot as that? His is the quickest draw I ever saw. This man has given me my life and I’m going to take it.” He put a handkerchief around his finger, touched his hat and bowed. He went out, got in his horse, and rode away alone.

 

Everyone in the bar room wanted to talk to me. I was popular right off, they wanted to know how I learned to shoot, what I did, where I was going, and a lot of questions. Dick wanted to go back to the ranch but we went on to the Springs. There was two of Jacks’ gang in the inn when the shooting occurred. We didn’t know if they would follow or not, but they was scared. You see it was all an accident that I hit him just that way, but they didn’t know that.

 

When Dick and I got back to the ranch the next evening, the cowboys fired their revolvers, let out Texas yells, and gave us a great reception. The news that I got Texas Jack reached the ranch before we did. Bushnell saw a chance and said, “Why yes, that is why I hired him, because he was a crack shot.” It was all fixed then. We were no longer “greenhorn Yanks,” we was “crack shots.” (68)

 

Case now bought a fine horse from McCabe’s son, for $35 in gold. “And that is how I got Bob,” he wrote. “Without Bob I would not be alive to tell this story.” For the rest of their time at the ranch, they were treated differently. They now had the respect of the men, who showed them how to handle the cattle.

 

McCabe’s men was to help nine days and furnish two cowboys after that, but we needed more. There was a half breed who said he would go with us and help drive, but he was afraid of the way the cowboys would treat him. I said, “Gray Eagle, no one will bother you. You go just like the other ones.” He was good with the stampede and I knew it.

 

“The thunder of their hooves…like the worst storm you ever heard.”

Stampedes were a time of great danger. Case explains:

 

No one can imagine if he has never seen one. … You never know when you may have one. The night horses are always saddled and bridled, ready. There you lie sleeping, dreaming of home, maybe, and then three shots ring out. You pull your stake and call, “Bob.” Then you hear the steers. Oh, the thunder of their hooves was like the worst storm you ever heard. Maybe you are driving along. All is quiet and a rabbit jumps up and one of them steers jumps and snorts, and off they go. Sometimes you just have them stopped, and off they go again.

 

“Bartlett and Fred,” Case said, had been through the war. They “could face bullets and Indians” without fear, “but not them steers on a stampede. They would not do it.”

 

To stop the stampede:

 

There is nothing for anyone to do but ride, ride with them, keep still and ride; ride until you come up to the leader. That is where Gray Eagle came in. He would ride along beside the leader. The steers would follow. He would lead them around and around in a large circle first, then make it smaller and smaller. The steers would follow. He would lead and they wouldn’t know what they was following. They would run off a cliff or jump into a river if it happened to be in the path. They couldn’t always stop anyway. The ones behind pushed them forward and rushed on.

 

The prairie was full of stray cattle that kept getting in with our herd. We spent a good deal of time cutting them out and stampeding them in another direction, only to find at night they had been following and had overtaken us. They called the unbranded cattle mavericks, and in spite of all we could do many followed or herd all the way.

 

We had camped several days during which time we had butchered some mavericks. (I learned early that no driver expected to eat his own cattle.) Pasture was good and our cattle filled up ready for the big drive to the Trinity River. The river was down and we expected to start the next morning, when it started raining again. All night long the rain poured down, the thunder rolled, and the sky was lighted with flashes. The cattle never lay down. They milled around and clashed horns, uneasy all night. Everybody was in the saddle, watching and singing to the cattle to keep them quiet. We didn’t suppose anyone could sleep anyway. We missed Fred and Bartlett, and in the morning the boys said, “Where the hell was you?” The funny part of it was that Bartlett and Fred, accustomed to sleeping during the roar of battle and noises of the Army, slept through it all. (69)

 

The rain poured down for days. “There was nothing dry to burn and no fire to cook with. What we had to eat for a week was honey and crackers. The water we drank came from a mudhole. The boys all got the blues.”

 

Case describes another stampede, once more on a rainy night:

 

I was asleep on the ground and I heard the revolvers signal they was off. I called to Bob, but Bob was right there. He came running up and stopped. He stopped barely long enough for me to get my foot in the stirrup and he was off. We didn’t have any time to lose, the steers came on fast, about on us. I wasn’t afraid they could overtake us – they couldn’t catch Bob if he could see – but it was so dark I couldn’t see my horse’s head before me. I wasn’t afraid Bob would stumble. He never stumbled in his life, but I thought of them holes in the prairie, made by little prairie animals, where a horse running in the dark and not being able to see, might step and fall. Bob new! He knew just as well as I did that he was running for his life as well as mine. All of a sudden I felt Bob halt – halt for just a fraction of a second and gather himself for a jump. I knew it was a jump and a big one; I was ready in the stirrup. He sprang into the air and it seemed we was off the ground two minutes. I wondered what it was and if there was any ground at all. I thought it must be a wide gulch. Then his front feet caught the ground, but I felt his back feet miss and go down. My foot in the stirrup caught the ground. I was off the saddle, pulling on it and lifting Bob with all my might. How he fought! He made it. He hesitated just an instant for me to get my foot in the stirrup, and he was off. The first cattle went into the gulch, and the others over them and on. I could feel their breath. After quite a run, the cattle scattered and we stopped.

Herd stampeded by lightning.

 

The next morning the boys went back to gather up the cattle and found, in what they called a “wash,” fifteen head of cattle that fell in and broke their necks, or did not get out of the way of the ones coming behind. I never saw it. Dick did. When he come back he sat down and looked at me. I said, “What’s up?”

 

He said, “Perry, how the devil did you jump that gulch? You and Bob must have jumped at least thirty feet. There is not a spot where you could have got over less than thirty feet.”

 

I knew it. There was not a horse in the herd that could have jumped it; not a horse anywhere unless trained especially. (70)

 

Case also remembered:

 

We had great times.

 

One of the boys got stung with a stinging lizard. One of the fellows brought in a horned toad one night. He killed a snake that measured twelve feet. Bartlett saw a rattlesnake just as it struck a steer in the leg. He shot the rattlesnake, but we had to shoot the steer too. (70)

 

Near Greenville the prairie was burning. It was one of the most beautiful sites I’d seen. Because of the pasture being destroyed we had to turn out of our way five miles. Cattle got scared of the fire and we had to be in the saddle all night, but it was a beautiful sight. Beyond Greenville, we camped with a preacher for the night. We had a good pen for the cattle, and the boys had all the ripe plums and blackberries they could eat. That was a treat!

 

One night a “norther” blew in and the men nearly froze. “We put on our overcoats and could not keep warm in them. Dick said he did not know it could be cold in hell.” The boys were miserable for three nights. “Perry,” Dick asked one night, “are you awake? Put your hand out.”

 

Case did, and there, under his friend’s arm was a little kitten, all curled up and asleep. No one knew where the kitten came from, but the next morning they put it in the chuck wagon and let it ride.

 

“This little girl must go back to her mother.”

Another day, they camped early in the bend of a river. Gray Eagle heard something and warned it might be Indians:

 

We all heard horses coming then and jumped up with our guns loaded, ready. When they come around the curve, we yelled, “Halt!” We saw then to our surprise that one of them had a little white girl ahead of him. I said, “Where did you get that child?”

 

One said, “Father kill brother.”

 

I said, “And you stole her for revenge?”

 

The same one said, “Father kill brother.”

 

I said, “Why did he kill your brother? Did your brother drive off his cattle and horses?”

 

They didn’t say anything.

 

I said, “I don’t want to take sides with you or the cowhands neither one, but this little girl must go back to her mother and you go on before her father comes back and shoots you.”

 

They grunted and rode on. Dick gave the little girl his kitten, and I took her back to her mother. The woman could not talk to thank me for a time. She said she was out hanging up clothes and Indians got in the house before she saw them. She said she had a gun and could use it but they was gone too far before she saw them.

 

We was well up to the Red River and across the Red was the Indian nation. One day I was scouting ahead of the herd when I saw a man walking toward me. As I rode up I noticed he was staggering and weaving as if he was about to fall. It always means an accident if a man is on the plains without a horse. When I got close I saw his face was covered with blood and his skull cut wide open. His clothes was soaked with blood.

 

I said, “Did the Indians get you?”

 

He looked right at me for a full minute or more, then said, “Yes.” He was that dazed.

 

…

 

We took him to the wagon and gave him water, and after a long, long sleep he could remember what had happened. He said they camped beside a stream for the night, twelve of them and their cattle and horses, and the first thing they knew they was surrounded by Indians. He could not tell how many. Every other man was killed; they had left him for dead. When he came to, the cattle and horses had been driven away and he had started walking. (71)

 

After yet another stampede, Bushnell lost his temper and yelled at the men. Case explained:

 

He did not understand the southerners, and they did not like a Yankee boss. When he quarreled, the men quit, and because of shortage of help the others had to be in the saddle night and day. Everybody had the blues; we had been out over a month up to the Red River.

 

“I did not care to look back.”

One night, Bob was stolen off the picket line, his rope cut clean through. Case suspected a man who had helped them across a river south of the Red, and who had taken a fancy to his horse and tried to buy him. Case now borrowed a horse, and set out after him, got help from several cowboys, and soon caught up with the thief. The others wanted to hang the man. Case said, “No. I’ve got my pony. That’s all I care for. He ain’t no ordinary horse thief. He wanted the pony so bad. Let him go, he has a wife and children.”

 

He added, “It was likely he went up the first tree when I was out of sight. I did not care to look back.”

 

Now, Perry had to catch up to the herd, some hundred miles ahead. A landlord where he stayed for one night packed him lunch for the day, and another for the next. He tied them in a package to Sal, his borrowed horse, but during his hard day’s ride, “there was a jolt and I lost it.”

 

I laid down without any supper and staked the ponies out to pasture. As soon as daybreak I started on. I calculated to reach camp by the middle of afternoon. It was what the cowboys called a hard ride. Up to fifty miles is a “right smart,” I had learned. I rode all day without food. When I reached camp, they had gone!

 

He set off again the next day and soon met Dick riding back, hoping to find him. Dick explained that Bushnell’s herd and another had gotten mixed up while trying to cross a river. Bushnell was furious and the boss of the other herd was threatening trouble. Case told Dick to ride back, make it know to the cowboys with the other herd that Dick and the Bushnell group were friends with the very man that “cleaned out” Texas Jack. Case would catch up soon. “I gave him time to get back, and I took care to comb out my hair and whiskers. They reached down here to my waist. My hair was long too. I hadn’t cut it since the presidential election because of a bet I made about the election.”

 

Once he reached camp, looking like a wild man, he managed to intimidate the boys with the other herd. Bushnell and his men drove their cattle across and into Indian Territory, “The nation of the Choctaws.”

 

There was Indians all along. We watched our horses all the time. We never left them staked alone to pasture, but we took pains to not molest any of the Indians. When we came out on good feeding ground, we talked it over. Bushnell wanted I should take two men and go ahead and ask the Indians to pass through their territory. I decided two or twenty would not help if the Indians decided to attack. I rode ahead of the herd alone to the Indian village, where they told me I would find the chief. There was Indians all along.

 

When I rode up to the village, the old Indian chief come out. He had two warriors with him. I did not know what to do, but I rode right up.

 

The chief said to go right through and we would not be molested. I don’t know whether we would have been or not if I had not asked, but they kept their word. (74)

 

July found the Bushnell crew on the open plains. The heat was terrible. Feed was scarce. Several head died from eating poisonous weeds. Bushnell quarreled with his men again and they quarreled among themselves. One day, Case rode up to where Bushnell was seated alone on his horse. The boss was crying. He told Case three of the men were talking about quitting, maybe more. Case said he would ride back to camp and try to fix it. Bushnell should wait and come later. When Case returned,

 

I took off my hat and gave the old Texas yell. Most of the fellows yelled and came out. I saw three sulking over at one side. Says I, “What is the matter here?” They did not say much, and I looked all around and asked, “Where is Bushnell?”

 

Then they let loose. Said they did not know and did not care. They said he did not know how to drive a drove of cattle and he had too ugly a temper to manage them. I said, “He is an old man and is sick and has a lot of money tied up in these cattle. He is not himself.” Then I told them stories and Dick threw pebbles at that steer of the middle team of Fred’s. When we got old Fred to cuss or try to cuss – for he would stutter and couldn’t say a word – the fellows had to laugh, and a man can’t stay mad when he has to laugh. Then Bushnell came in and they got quiet.

 

He said, “Case, I am sick. I want you to take charge of things now and when I have anything to say, I will say it to you.”

 

The herd passed the Ouachita River. One night the crew stopped to camp in the Fourche Mountains. There were so many rattlesnakes they had to pick up and move camp another mile. By this time Bushnell was so sick he could hardly ride. Money was just about out. He was in despair. “The wolves prowled around and howled all night. A night I won’t forget,” Case wrote later. (75)

 

At daylight they were off again. “It was hot – hot – Gawd it was hot.” When they reached the Poteau River, six herds were waiting to cross. That night, another terrible stampede. Their herd was not involved, but Case went back later to see the damage, calling it “the awfulest sight” he had ever seen. “Eight men, sixteen horses, and forty head of cattle killed and the horns knocked off I don’t know how many more cattle.” (76)

 

They drove over the Poteau Mountains. “Things got worse and worse. We had to make a litter and carry Bushnell. … Our money was gone.”

 

“June bugs and field mice.”

When they reached Fort Smith, they sold one cow to raise money and got supplies. They killed another for beef to eat. “We found good pasture for the cattle,” and Case and Bushnell rode into town. It was soon agreed that Bushnell must be sent home by steamboat. “The old was crying and couldn’t talk,” when he left. It was July 25. Now Case had full charge. All the other cowboys they had hired had gone back to Texas. Only Bartlett, Fred, Dick and Case were left. “Money was short,” he wrote. “Everybody was blue.” Near Prairie Grove, in Arkansas, they talked to people who told them Yankee soldiers had come through in 1865 and burned everything.

 

We saw two little boys who said they hadn’t seen any bread for six weeks but they lived mighty well now: they had peas to eat.

 

“What the devil did you live on?” Bartlett asked.

 

“June bugs and field mice,” the boys said.

 

These boys were war victims. We saw hundreds of people like these, left destitute by the war. Historians of the North don’t tell this, but this is how it was and I am going to tell it.

 

We drove on over the mountains: there was no water, no grass, nothing but rocks. What to do? The cattle’s feet got sore on the stones, and yet we couldn’t stop. We had to drive on for feed. (76)

 

By this point, with another three hundred miles to go before they reached the Mississippi, everyone was suffering. Case “had a hard chill and fever.” Bartlett was hatless, having lost his during a stampede. Case looked down and saw he was shoeless, too. That was it! He decided they had to drive on, and find a place where they could sell something and replenish their supplies – and shoes.

 

We started on the next day. It was better, but oh, what pitiful sights. We came to a place where three roads come together, and there was four boys. Someone called the boys and asked them where they lived. No houses in sight. There wasn’t a house left standing. The Union soldiers had burned everything.

 

They said, “Over in the big cave.”

 

Someone said, “How many are there of you?”

 

“Oh, right smart.”

 

By this time I knew that “right smart meant” there was a whole lot. I said, “I would like to ride over with you.”

 

At the cave, two women came out. They had three or four kinds of material pinned around them, pinned with thorns, not pins, mind you.

 

I said, “You have iron kettles, haven’t you?”

 

     “Yes,” they said.

 

“And I see salt.”

 

“Yes, the hoops was burned from the barrels but the salt would not burn.”

 

I called the men and killed the mavericks, and we filled all the iron kettles with meat and salted it down in all the vessels we could manage to round up.

 

The women was ashamed to come out before the men but I told them to not be afraid, that not one of my men would dare to mistreat them. I begged the women not to let the children eat all they could at first but to give them just broth at first.

 

An old, old woman came out with a stick in each hand to help her walk. She was bent over almost to the stick, and her hair was gray and not combed; it hung around her face all tangled up. She was a pitiful sight.

 

She said, “Mister, do you care if I pray?”

 

I told the fellows to get off their horses and take off their hats. Gawd I never heard such a prayer. It was thanks given for an answered prayer, a prayer to send them food, and she had had her prayer answered. I never heard a prayer in all my life touch me like that. I can’t tell it yet without crying. (77-78)

 

Perry Case said he never understood why those mavericks had followed their herd all the way from Texas. Now he thought he knew. God had a plan; and these cattle could now feed these starving people. They found more starving folk near Yellville and left them meat and hardtack, because “that was all we had.” In this region there had been guerrilla warfare, and the Union soldiers had shown no mercy on the “bushwhackers,” nor the bushwhackers on the men in blue. There was poverty everywhere. Homeless families, with no man to help widow or children.

“A girl, young and pretty, but awful thin and poor.”

 

Not all these women were bushwhackers’ wives. Some of them was women who had good homes; their husbands had gone to war. The soldiers burned them out alike. That evening we stopped at an old plantation, no fences, no trees, but rich land that had grown up the grass for the cattle. A girl came out and said we could not camp there.

 

Old Fred was b-b-b-ing, stuttering so he couldn’t say word when I come up. There she was, a girl, young and pretty, but awful thin and poor. Her eyes was large, and dark all around them.

 

She said, “You can’t stop on this plantation.”

 

Says I, “How far to the next one?”

 

She says, “A wee bit.”

 

I knew this was only a mile or two and I says to the boys, “Go on.”

 

Then I said, “Why are you here alone?”

 

Says she, “I wouldn’t talk to you a minute but for the pin you wear. [Case always wore his Masonic Lodge pin on his coat; and it had helped him out several times during the drive.] My father was a Mason, and my oldest brother. They were both killed on the battlefield. The news killed my mother. Then bushwhackers stole all our horses and cattle and even the chickens. They sent home from the war my youngest brother to die: he had gangrene in his foot. Our buildings were burned by the Union soldiers, and I did not have a spade to bury my brother when he died. I dug that grave there with my hands and covered it with evergreens.”

 

“What are you waiting for?” I asked.

 

“To die.”

 

Case could not bear to leave her in this situation, told her she was still young, and could still marry “and have a family of your own and live a life yet.”

 

At that, she broke into tears for the first time.

 

He offered to give her a ride back to the crossroads, where they had found the starving families. She said she’d never ride a Yank’s horse. “Gawd, she had spunk,” Case wrote in admiration.

 

She did finally agree she would walk to the crossroads and gave her word she would not stay there alone.

 

Case and the rest continued to drive the herd forward. Another day they came upon two boys, who also looked down on their luck. They told the cowboys all they ate were melons. Fred went down to their house and took the family some meat. The woman of the house met him at the door, but only stuck her hand out. “I haven’t enough clothes to cover my nakedness,” she said. The cowboys soon gave her one of their overcoats, and since Bartlett was the smallest of their group, sent her one of his white shirts. “The next day the woman came up in the original hobble skirt, but no woman in a hobble skirt was ever as proud as that woman.” (78)

 

(The hobble skirt was popular with women in the early 1900s, a few years before Case set down the story of this cattle drive. It was tight enough around the ankles to limit how far a woman could step, and like a “hobble” for horses, which made it hard for the animal to run away.)

 

Texas herds not wanted.

Having now crossed into Missouri, Case discovered that laws had been passed to keep Texas cattle out, because a previous herd had brought disease with it.

 

Missouri cattle would be infected, he wrote, and “would start to bellow and paw as if they smelt fresh blood. They would then start drooling and staggering, not drink, gnaw roots and the ground about them, and finally fall over dead. Nothing could save them: they had Spanish fever.” (79)

 

Case hated to break the law; but he felt he had no choice. He waited to let his herd rest. Then one evening, they drove all night, and all the next day, and all the next night. Still, they were stopped before they could reach the Mississippi River and cross into Illinois. Sixteen armed men blocked the road. Case admitted he knew he and his men were breaking the law, but explained:

 

I did not come this way just to break your laws, and I don’t want to cause anyone any trouble. We started from Ohio, and have been through some tight places. The men who bought these cattle lost his nerve; he was an old man and sick. We sent him home to die. I’m taking these cattle through for his widow and family and to get enough to pay these men. We are out of money. Our cattle haven’t had salt for weeks. We haven’t had enough to eat ourselves. My men all need clothes. They have been through a good deal, and can’t stand much more. I did not know you would pass this law until I got here. You made this law since I started. Now we have come fast. Nowhere in Missouri have we stopped where there was settlers until here on the edge of the prairie. None of your cattle are exposed. If you will keep them away from this pasture until a rain or three days of heavy dew, your cattle will not catch the Spanish fever.

 

One of the riders spurred up his horse and cracked his whip. “That is the damn Yank of it,” he said. I shook my head at old Fred and Bartlett. That was hard for soldiers to take.

 

Again, one of the Missourians noticed Case’s Masonic pin. They went off to talk, and the argument lasted an hour. “Gawd,” he wrote, “it looked bad.” Finally, they were allowed to proceed, and soon reached the river. At the river, the ferryman said it would be $72 to take the cattle across. Case was planning to leave him several ponies, go ahead, sell a few cattle, and return with the money. The ferryman noticed Case’s pin, told the rest of men to go up the hill to a store he owned and get shoes and coats and anything else they needed. He even reached in his pocket and gave Case thirty dollars.

 

Bartlett was so excited to be across the river, he threw up his new hat and shouted, “Back home!” “We was three or four weeks’ drive from Chicago,” Case knew,  but the men “went into camp singing and joking that night.”

 

On September 6, Case had to turn down several offers to sell the cattle and ship them by rail the rest of the way, after he checked with Bushnell, who  was very much alive, by wire. Not until November 3, did the herd reach Chicago, where the cattle were finally sold. Two extra months on the trail, and cold weather had caused them to lose weight, and they sold for less than they might have two months earlier. Perry Case claimed he never knew how Bushnell came out on the deal in the end, but he was told that when his old boss got back to Ohio, he was “walking and nearly barefoot.”

 

Case himself married the next year, started a family, and turned to farming. The one great adventure of his life was behind him.

 

One day, when Perry was an old man, an acquaintance happened to go to the circus. An old cowboy did a set of rope tricks. At the end, he held up his hand, missing a finger, and told the story of his gunfight years before, and said if anyone knew his adversary from that day, he’d like to meet him again someday. It was Texas Jack! The Fort Wayne, Indiana paper even ran a story about his request, and briefly, Perry Case was famous. He never had a chance to meet Texas Jack again. He finished dictating the story of the “Long Drive,” sixty years after he completed it. He died in January 1926, aged about eighty-eight.

Large areas in the western U.S. have lost population in recent decades.

Abandoned high school, Ness County, Kansas.