Chapter III: Part 3

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Nature’s secrets, to a great extent, have been revealed, but if the practical man be not acquainted with the things revealed, to what avail their revelations? Until teacher and practical farmer are congenial in the full sense of the word, the power of the soil will remain unknown.

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Plants drink and do not eat: therefore, Nature, although robbed by man of many methods, and now needing man’s assistance, still provides means of converting insoluble elements into drinkable or water-soluble foods. All insoluble foods brought to the surface by plowing are decomposed by freezes, frosts and snows, and are acted upon by carbonic acid, other acids, oxygen and carbonate of lime. Again, if the soil be properly conditioned rains will carry the acids, oxygen and lime down below the surface to accomplish the same end. After the end is accomplished, the soluble foods are brought back to the plants by capillary attraction. Humus should be in the soil to hold the moisture or foods coming from above and below.

* * * * *

System breeds success, neglected details, failure.

* * * * *

Farming needs brains as well as brawn; furthermore, it offers far greater opportunities for brains than do the overcrowded professions of the cities.

* * * * *

Buy for cash, and you will get more and need less.

* * * * *

We are known by our faults and judged by the errors we make.

Wouldst Thou Succeed?

Wouldst thou succeed? Then master each detail,
Hold them in hand as reinsmen hold their steeds,
Firmly, yet urge them on. Let no false needs
Slip up on right or left and make bewail.
Onward—drive them yet onward, and prevail
Ere Doubt shall sow her hesitating seeds
To flower in Failure rank or other breeds
Of Mishap, Chance and Ill-luck that assails.

Wouldst thou succeed? Finish the work in hand
Nor dabble here and there while Time goes on
And naught is done—and one by one the sand
Of moment, turns to heaps of hours gone.
Finish—Finish—at the dawn of light
’Twas stamped in stars across the perfect night.

JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE.

Stories of the Soil

The Little Things of Life, Happening All Over the World and
Caught in Ink for Trotwood’s Monthly.

War Babies.

The most gigantic struggle of modern times was the American Civil War. In no other country but this, with its breadth of conservativeness and its dearth of caste, could the bitterness of such a war have been so quickly forgotten. As it is in a few more decades, if the same spirit of good feeling continues to prevail, and the fanatics be allowed to die a natural death, it will be a question as to which side will have the most respect for the brave men of the other. A striking feature of the great war, to me, has always been the unanimity with which the entire country, with the probable exception of the military leaders themselves, expected the war to speedily terminate. In the South the enlisted men all feared it would end before they had time to get into a rousing good battle, and the same feeling appears to have existed among the Northern volunteers.

As an illustration of this feeling in the South, in talking to an old farmer the other day, and he a gallant cavalryman, who belonged to Forrest’s immortal command, he laughingly remarked, that the greatest number of colts he ever saw at one time was a certain Tennessee cavalry regiment the first year after the war. “You see,” he said, “none of us expected the war to last over three or six months, and never dreamed it would go over a year. Nearly every man in our regiment went in on his pet saddle mare or half thoroughbred, and fully two-thirds of us were horse breeders, on a greater or less scale, while at home. But the war went on, we were ordered here and there, hundreds of miles from home with plenty of fighting and little else to think of. We were kept so busy that many of us, in fact, had forgotten all about the spring breeding, and would have been glad if it had forgotten about itself. But not so; the next spring there came the colts—war babies, to be sure—dropped into a hard world at a cruel and unmotherly time, and before we knew it our regiment had more colts than we knew what to do with. I had to send my mare home and get a fresh mount, and the others traded around, or left dam and colt to shift for themselves in strange and foreign lands. I have often wondered what became of that crop of colts, the first breeding venture of our regiment.”

A Contest in the King’s English.

There is a young darky downtown, at a livery stable, who has been priding himself on his ability, as he expressed it, “ter fling English.” But he takes no pride in it any more. Old Wash cured him, and it happened this way:

“Wheneber I goes down dar arter yo’ mare,” the old darky said, “dis heah young niggah gins ter fling his English ’roun’ scan’lus. I tell you, boss, I’m gittin’ tired ob dat, an’ I’m gwi’ teach ’im how ter talk English sho’ nuff some day. I sw’ar to you, sah,” said the old man, as he mopped his face with his red handkerchief, “It’s so hot I’ve mighty nigh multerplied, an’ I’ve got de commissary rumertism, ter boot; but jes you watch out fur me de naixt time dat nigger ’gins ter fling his jaw-bone ’roun’ whar I’m standin’—jes you watch me riddle ’im wid sintax an’ orfrography an’ sich! Jes you watch!”

For several days after that I noticed the old man studying an old Davies Geometry and an obsolete work on synonyms, which I had sent to the attic long ago—looking, as he expressed it, for “some good cuss-words to fit de ’casion.” But I had forgotten all about it until one evening I drove into the stable with him. A sprightly young darky ran out, took the mare by the bit, and patronizingly remarked:

“Gentermen, condescen’ to disintergrate frum de vehicle, an’ de quadruped shall hab my unqualified solicertashun, wid abundance ob nutrititious ellerments.” And he smirked at the old man as much as to say: “Don’t dat parlyze you, old man?”

“Hold on dar,” exclaimed Old Wash, and his eyes flashed as he rose quickly to the occasion: “Sonny,” he began witheringly, “it is transparent to de interlactual apprehension ob eny disinterested individual dat de gravertashun of special conceits described on de hypotonuse of your simeon-headed eclipse, am entirely too cumbershum fur de horizontal vinculum dat circumscribes de radius ob yo’ cocoanut-shaped trapezium, sah!”

“Wha—wha—what dat you say, Unker Wash?” gasped the young darky as his jaw began to drop.

“I merely riz ter interjec’ de mental reservashun,” remarked the old man indifferently, “dat de interlectual hemmerage of verbosity procedin’ from de vacuum produced by de metermorphosis ob de origonal superstructure of de san’-stones ob yo’ cranium, am entirely incumpatabul wid de consterpastion of ideas generated by de paralysis ob yo’ interlectual acumen, sah!”

“Gord, what is he sayin’?” remarked the young negro sheepishly to the crowd that had gathered to enjoy his discomfiture.

“In udder words,” shot out the old man again, “ter make hit entirely incomprehensibul to de conglommerated hypothesis ob yo’ trapezoidal interlec’, I simply remarked dat de corporeal superfluerty ob yo’ physical insigniferkance am entirely too cumbersome fur de belly-band ob yo’ mental confermashun, sah!”

Here the crowd shouted, the young darky’s eyes looked like moons, his legs shook, and he gasped out: “Wha—wha—what dat old man talkin’ ’bout, man?”

“How long since this nigger wus cotch in the jungles of Africa,” asked Old Wash quietly of the proprietor of the stable, “dat he can’t understan’ de simples’ remark in de plaines’ of English?”

And then the old man tried again. He rolled up his sleeves, and with the air of one who was trying to make himself exceedingly plain he began laying it off on his fingers and palm:

“Sonny, de equilateral altertude of de comprehenserbility ob my former observations wus to de effect dat, if in de course of a cummercial transacshun, I shu’d onexpectedly negotiate fur yo’ habeas-corporosity at its intrinsic invalidity an’ quickly dispose of it at de exaggerated hifolutiness of yo’ own colossal conceitability an’ hipnartic expectashun I’d have sufficient commercial collateral to transpose my present habitation to de perennial localization of de avenue called Easy.”

By this time the young darky was fairly groveling in the dust.

“Do yo’ comprehen’ dat,” yelled the old man, “yo’ po’ benighted parallelergram, distended from de apex of a truncated coon (cone), yo’ bow-legged son of a parallelopipedon—”

But the old man got no further with his geometrical swearing, for amid the shouts of the spectators his opponent had vanished, and as he went up the street to have the old man arrested for swearing in public, he remarked to the policeman as he told his tale: “I didn’t keer, Cap’n, ’bout ’im outgineralin’ me er flingin’ English, an’ outcussin’ me in mo’ kinder newfangled cuss words den eber cum out ob Turkey, but when he ’flected on my mother by callin’ me de bow-legged-son-ob-a-parrot-an-er-pigeon-roost, de nigger don’t lib dat I gwi’ take dat frum!”

It was a week later before Old Wash and I had occasion to drive into the stable again. We were met by the same darky, who took the mare by the bit and meekly remarked: “Light, gentlemen; I’ll take de mair.”

And the old man said: “I am so excruciatinly rejoiced, sonny, to recognize de rejuvernated resurrection ob de exhileratin’ perception dat an infinertesermal ray ob common sense has penertrated de comatose condition ob yo’ fibrous misunderstanding’. In other words,” he winked, “I’se saved an ebononic interlec frum er new-bohn grave.”

“The Little Girl.”

Pioneer days in Texas, and the prairies unbroken by the smoke of a single cabin. To the south the Brazos, and to the west the buffalo lands, the herds crawling in the distance, like huge mud-waves on land, toward their fall feeding grounds.

There had been raids by the Comanches, then hot fighting with the troops and every settler west of the Brazos had run into the fort, each with his family, his man-servant and maid-servant, each with his cattle and his asses. For the Comanches are wily devils and born horsemen. One day they are here, and the next they are not. And they go on ponies that are as tough as their riders, and as fast and as fearless, and no man knows when and where they will strike.

Three full companies of troops had gone north on the track of the desperate band who, but a few days before, had surprised the settlers on the upper Brazos and, after killing and scalping and plundering, had fled, as the troops thought, northward. The stricken settlers had been coming in for two days, all plundered, tired, many wounded and some still sobbing with the grief that would never die.

There were little children—motherless, fatherless. There were mothers and fathers who but a day before held loving ones in their arms.

Troop H, 7th Regiment, was holding the fort while the other companies went north to avenge.

The First Lieutenant of Troop H was a beardless youth just from West Point. He had been shot out of West Point into the saddle and to the front. Two months of it had bronzed him and added two years to his looks; but sentiment was still in him and Romance claimed his for her own. He had had enough fighting for any ordinary trooper, but to-day he felt sad that three companies had gone north after the marauders and he—he held the peaceful fort.

The sun was setting across the great plains and shadows had lengthened to their uttermost when a man on a cow-pony galloped in, not from the north, but from the west.

His pony was reeling at the first gate. It was dead in the fort ten minutes later. The man himself carried two Comanche arrows sticking through a shoulder and an arm. A gash was in his head from a glancing arrow and blood ran from another that had cut across his forehead.

He was unconscious before the surgeon could extract the arrows from his body, but he said enough. The Comanches were not north, but west—they had attacked him in his little squatter cabin forty miles west—they had killed all his stock but one pony—he had no family but a little girl—he had escaped on the pony. “An’ the little gal—God knows—I seed her cut for a dug-out in the side of a hill—a kind of a cellar—where I kept pertatoes an’ sich—then—wal—”

He went to sleep.

“Let him sleep,” said the surgeon, “he is nearly gone as it is—forty miles and blood leakin’ out of him every jump of the pony.”

Ten minutes later the bugler called “boots and saddles,” and when Company H wheeled in the fort’s square, the Captain said:

“Well, men, the boys are on a cold trail. You have heard where the devils are; we can’t all go. Half of us must stay behind to hold the fort. I’ll be fair to all, for I know you all want to go, so count by twos.”

“One,”

“Two.”

“One,”

“Two.”

It went down the line, one hundred strong.

“Numbers Two, ten paces forward, march!”

There was a happy smile on Numbers Two as they spurred forward—they knew what it meant. They were lucky.

“Now, boys, you know I want to lead you,” went on the Captain, “but it isn’t fair. I must take my chances, too, and tote fair with the First Lieutenant. Lieutenant Troup will toss up with me,” he said with a laugh as he tossed a coin from his saddle into the air. It flashed high up in the sunlight.

“Heads for me, Lieutenant, and here’s wishing you—”

“Tails!” said the soldier who picked it up.

The Lieutenant flushed as he spurred forward saluting. Then men cheered again and the Captain wheeled, saying:

“Take them out, Lieutenant Troup—it’s your luck, and maybe—ah, well, you can’t tell how many there are, you know, and half a company is mighty few after sending out three troops. Leave your trinkets, men, and any message you may wish to send home. Yes, it’s a nasty bit of a fight you’ll be having, likely, and I wish it had been my luck to be in it. I have been in service a little longer, you know, perhaps the Lieutenant might—”

But the Lieutenant only smiled and saluted again.

“I’ll do my best, Captain—war is on and it’s my time, you know.”

The Captain pressed his hand as the Company filed out of the fort.

And all the time the Lieutenant kept thinking of the half-dead man who kept saying even in his delirium: “An’ my little gal—God knows—I seed her cut for a dug-out—”

The Lieutenant was young—very young—and he was romantic. He could see the little girl—of course she was about sixteen—all settlers called their grown girls little. Perhaps—well—if she hadn’t been killed—

The troup wanted to gallop, but the Lieutenant brought them to a steady trot:

“It’s all right, men, and ten miles an hour is fast enough. We may need our horses for all that’s in them. We’ll be there by midnight as it is.”

The moon arose and drifted higher and higher and still the troopers struck grimly across the plain. The wind brought the howl of wolves—big greys—and the yelp of coyotes, but the troopers turned neither to the right nor left, and the Lieutenant rode at their head, and all the time he was wondering what had become of the pretty girl—helpless—alone. “An’ my little gal—God knows—I seed her cut for a dug-out!”

It was the first streak of day. The men and horses had been resting for four hours—those not on picket, and some had even slept and were fresh. But the young officer could think of nothing but the little girl, and wonder at her fate.

They had lined in behind a few willows that skirted a small stream and were concealed from the view of the Indians. Then they looked well to rifles and Colts. The light came slowly and as they peered through the mist where the cabin stood only a burnt place blurred the dry grass of the prairie. There were no Indians in sight.

“Thar—look!”

It was an old Indian fighter whose keen eyes saw it first—a thing which looked like a potato-house butting out of a clay bank.

“Thar’s life in thar—see—it’s the little gal, an’ she’s alive yit—see!”

From the protection of small rises on the right three Comanches galloped out encircling the dug-out in a very generous circle. They had slipped on the off-side of their ponies and clung to mane and neck, with one leg and heel thrust over the flank.

The old fighter snarled: “The cowardly coyotes! They seem ter be mighty skeered of a little gal. Say, but they’ve got a whole lot o’ respect for her; she must have a weep’n o’ some sort in thar an’ tort ’em a crackin’ less’n with it, or them dogs ’ud et her up befo’ now; why—thar, by gad—”

He gripped the Lieutenant’s shoulder as a puff of smoke leaped out of the clay bank and the foremost pony stopped so quickly that it went down, Comanche under.

“She’s killed that Indian sho’,” cried the old hunter in a whisper. “No live Comanche was ever cocht under a fallin’ pony. See.”

The pony sprang quickly up—the bullet had creased him; but marvelous the shot!—it had gone to the exact spot where it would bring down a pony creased and a rider with a hole through his head.

“That’s shootin’ some,” cried the old hunter as the young officer gave the quick commands:

“Ready!”

“Mount!”

“Charge!”

“An’ remember the little gal!” they shouted as they broke across the plains.

It was a running fight and the Indians taken by surprise, for they were after the thing in the dug-out. And they paid for it—sixteen dead ones in the first half mile. The others—they had enough to get away from the forty troopers who shot as they rode and shot to kill.

Then the Lieutenant and ten men rode back to the dug-out. They approached it slowly—reverently, and all the time the young officer was thinking of dark eyes and auburn curls and the beauty and bravery of the little girl.

“Hello!” he shouted, his voice trembled in spite of himself. “Hello!—we’re your friends.”

“Hello, yo’self—mighty glad to see you.”

“It’s the little girl, men,” shouted the Lieutenant, boyishly, as he rushed up. “She’s safe! hurrah!” and they gave it with a ring.

At the door he stopped short and looked into the hole under the potato-house.

Then his romance went out as the tide to the sea.

A woman at least thirty-five stood there. Her hair was red, her features hard, her face burned by the sun. Grim, square jaws set off her face. There was a line only to show where her lips met in deadly determination. She wore moccasins and leggins, a short skirt of deer skin and she held in her hand a rifle that had sent a dozen Indians to death in the twelve long hours she had held the little fort. Stuck in her belt were two good pistols. A thousand Comanches with arrows and antiquated guns could not have taken her.

“Oh!” she said, “but I’m glad to see you. Say, but I stood ’em off all right, didn’t I? It was awful—’specially last night, but the moon riz an’ saved me, for a Comanche with an arrow or a old gun is kinder techus ’bout a rifle. Is Pap safe?”

They told her he was.

“I tried to git the old fool to stay. I told him all hell couldn’t git us out o’ this hole, armed as we wus, lessen they come with bilin’ water,” she laughed, “but he got panicky an’ vamoosed on the only pony left. Dad allers was a gal.”

“Good gad,” cried the old hunter bluntly at last, “an’ is you the little gal he kip talkin’ ’bout?”

“Oh, he allers called me that,” she smiled.

“Well, you’re the gamest little gal I ever seed,” and he wrung her hand while the others followed suit. “An’ you’re our little gal now,” went on the old hunter, proudly, “an’ as I ain’t seed one like you since mine died years ago, I’d—I’d—I’d lak to kiss you jes onct for her,” he stammered.

“Oh, you shet up,” she said hotly. “D’ye think I stood off a lot o’ Comanches all night to be rewarded by kissin’ a old grizzly like you? But say,” she added, hesitating, and with a laugh, “I wouldn’t mind kissin’ that pretty little boy thar!”

There was a wild shout from the men, but the young Lieutenant had turned to mount his horse.

“Any way you belong to Company H,” said the old hunter.

A Preface.

At the request of the ladies of a church in Marion, Alabama, Trotwood wrote the following Preface, a few weeks ago for a cook-book which the ladies are publishing with a view of paying off a church debt:

The climate, the soil, the very air play their part in the art of good recipes. The cooking of the North and West is very different from that of the South, for Southern recipes are the products of sunshine and Southlands, of culture, of rest, of the Old South.

And nowhere has the Old South flowered to sweeter perfume than in my native town of Marion. Macaulay’s New Zealander, if placed in Delmonico’s would straightway beckon for cold clam, and good King Edward, if stranded in New Zealand, would soon fish an oyster cocktail out of some unruffled kiss of the sea.

Recipes, indeed, are a test of one’s civilization—one’s religion—one’s mentality. They are the products of the centuries beginning with the primitive clam and ending with the thousand glories of the oyster. They are the literature of the laughter which comes with good eating, the bon mots of jolly stomachs, the sparkle of centuries of good cheer, the morals of mucous membranes, the religion of healthy livers.

Charles Lamb tells us that roast pig, for instance, was accidentally discovered by the primitive man in the burning of his crude stable in which was a litter of pigs. After that, fires were frequent and log stables few. And I doubt not if the history of every good recipe in this splendid collection were traced to its birth, it would show an unbroken line of progress as clearly defined as Magna Charta.

Think not lightly, then, of the book, for you have in your hand the concentrated perfection of the culinary ages. The dash of Caesar into Briton, the strength of the Dane, the brilliancy of the Norman, the excellency of Angle and Saxon, the glory of the English and the old Scotch. It is history, religion, progress. It is a novel more interesting than all novels, a poem which made Tennyson possible.

I have not read these recipes. I speak from higher authority. I have tasted them. From my infancy up I have known them. They are part of my life and this article returned to them is a feeble result of their cause. They are interwoven with the memory of my home, in the song of the pine tree, in the opal gleam of the old red hills, in the sweetness, the culture, the religion of Marion. And to-night, should Abou Ben Adhem’s Angel come to me and ask for the name of one blessed beyond his dues, I would answer: “It is I, O Angel, blessed beyond words in the mother I had, in the father; blessed in my birthplace, in the people among whom I grew up, in the moral sweetness of their schools and churches, blessed that I was born in

MARION.

An opal sky and a sea of green,
Marion.
And ruby-red the hills between,
Marion.
Twilight tints that blend and shine
Through sinking clouds and sighing pine—
Dear native land—sweet mother mine—
Marion.

Rest and peace and sweet release,
Marion.
Home and the loves that never cease,
Marion.
O, cradling stars from out the glen—
O, sweet moon-mother, come again—
O, Peace that passeth human ken—
Marion.

The Tennessee Jersey

BY W. J. WEBSTER.

NOTE.—Mr. W. J. Webster developed two of the three greatest
cows of the world to championship honors, and has made more
great churn tests than, perhaps, any other living man. His
experience is of the practical kind.—Ed.

This has become a well-known name among Jersey cattle breeders of the United States and frequently used in advertising strains of blood by the various owners. This is easily accounted for by the high stand taken by Jersey cows owned, developed and bred in Tennessee. Many years ago the pioneer breeders of this favorite dairy breed of cattle, Major Campbell Brown, Judge Thos. H. Malone, M. C. Campbell, M. M. Gardner, and the writer of this article, W. J. Webster, built their herds on a very solid foundation:

First—Constitution and ability to stand long continued high feed.

Second—Richness of milk as well as quantity, but with the goal always centered on production of butter as ascertained by actual test, without any instrument, calculation or guess work. The churn was adopted as a test system.

Third—Beauty, symmetry and general conformity. We early in our course of breeding determined that beauty of cattle should not be ignored, but was an element certainly in the sale. Therefore, Tennessee Jerseys were bred for all these qualities claimed and I do not think that anywhere in the United States a more uniform or more beautiful set of animals could be found.

The Middle Basin of Tennessee is especially adapted to the breeding, rearing and developing of this cow. We have here the elements of the soil entering into the blood of the animal which I think develops them more highly than in any other portion of the United States. We have lime rock and bone phosphate of lime entering into the water they drink, and the bluegrass and other grasses that they eat, corn, oats and hay consumed by them, and also mingled with enough iron so that the very highest opportunities are available for their growth. This thought applies not alone to the Jersey cow but to the whole animal kingdom as evidenced by the fact that some of the finest race horses in the world, either running or pacing horses, have been developed in this Middle Basin of Tennessee. In point of climate we are exceptionally well located, all things considered, about the same as the Isle of Jersey, the original home of the Jersey cow. No wonder then that with the additional advantages of our soil mentioned above the Jersey has developed wonderfully in Tennessee.

The question is sometimes asked why prices have declined the last twelve or fifteen years. My reply is that prices have not declined all over the United States, but that the old breeders have dropped out in Tennessee and that there are now very few breeders in Tennessee paying any attention to the development of the Jersey cow. Recently Messrs. Overton and Gardner, of Nashville, have begun to pay more attention to it and I predict that if this is continued the prices will again rise for they have not fallen in New York and other centers, but the present year sales are higher than they have ever been at auction, as shown by the general average at the Cooper sale of over six hundred dollars per head, a single animal bringing ten thousand dollars and that in a sale of over a hundred animals. So it is not a declining in the prices of the breed cattle but simply a lack of driving their interests in Tennessee.

The system of testing Jerseys and knowing exactly what they were capable of doing did more to develop them than anything else. The American is always an eminently practical man and wants to know what he is doing instead of guessing. The Tennessee breeders inaugurated this test system, Messrs. Campbell Brown, Thos. H. Malone, M. M. Gardner and W. J. Webster having edited the first compilation of test in the United States as a venture of their own and at their own risk and expense; then turned it over to the Club of American Jersey Cattle Breeders, and the work has been continued by the club since that time. Prior to this time tests were reported to newspapers and frequently tests were claimed for ancestors of cattle that subsequent research showed were either tests for one day multiplied by seven, making it an estimate test, or in some instances that they did not exist at all. It therefore required a large amount of labor to run down by correspondence all this and procure from their owners the actual tests, and these were published with the tabulated pedigree of the cow. This work caused a boom in the Jersey family shown to be prominent, and this has continued all along where they were pushed and developed. Tennessee breeders were fortunate in having laid well their foundation as it was based on such cows as Landseer’s Fancy, Oonan, Duchess of Bloomfield, Beeswax, Kate Gordon and other prominent and beautiful cows and it so happened that the cows named possessed all the requisites, constitution, richness and beauty, and no money was spared in heading the herd with such animals as Imported Tormentor, Signalda, Ida’s Stoke Pogis, Gold Basis, Southern Prince and other noted animals too numerous to mention. From these came what is known as the Tennessee Jerseys, possessing constitution, richness and beauty. As proof of the wonderful development of these cows any person who desires to be informed has only to consult the test books in charge of the American Jersey Cattle Club to find that the richest cattle ever bred, owned and developed were in Tennessee: Bisson’s Belle with the yearly test of 1,028 pounds and fifteen ounces, that held the champion cup, was developed in Tennessee; Landseer’s Fancy tested 936 pounds fourteen and three-quarter ounces in one year, was developed in Tennessee and held the cup. She and her descendants are known for their extreme richness: so marvelously rich that they were compelled to demonstrate their ability to make this test again and again, a number of times by official tests, by disinterested committees and verified by chemical analysis.

I could not in this article undertake to give a list of Jersey cows from Tennessee in the honor roll, but only mention a few of the prominent ones: Ethleel the Second, 30 pounds 15 ounces at two and one-half years old; Landseer’s Fancy, 29 pounds one-half ounce; Bisson’s Belle, 28 pounds 10 ounces; Toltec’s Fancy, 27 pounds 5½ ounces—this cow was officially tested by the Alabama experiment station and Major Campbell Brown, and her milk analyzed at Vanderbilt University confirms the test showing butter fat 16.32 per cent, equivalent to one pound of butter to 4.79 of milk; Oonan, 22 pounds 2½ ounces; Duchess of Bloomfield, 20 pounds one-half ounce; Cherokee Rose, 23 pounds 10 ounces. And I might continue even from memory, as this article is dictated from memory (no records being before me), and give a long list. But for the purposes of this article it would be useless and simply a compilation that the people would not read, so I only call attention to the fact that the champion cup, a large silver urn costing five hundred dollars, was held only four times in all; twice in Tennessee against the whole United States. But to prove that the Tennessee Jersey has life in any other hands, scattered far and wide over the United States we have only to look at the work of the last great test at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition at St. Louis to show what their descendants have done.

The American Jersey Cattle Club has published a pamphlet giving the work of the Jersey team of twenty-five selected from all over the United States under a committee appointed by the American Jersey Cattle Club which showed no favoritism, but the cows were judged for entrance into this team by preliminary tests at St. Louis and then the team selected by a committee. It ought to be very gratifying to the old breeders in Tennessee to analyze this pamphlet and find that the cattle bred, owned and developed in Tennessee have, through their descendants, put their mark on thirteen of the twenty-five. It certainly is very pleasant to the writer of this to find that Tormentor, owned by Major Campbell Brown, placed his mark on twelve of the twenty-five; Landseer’s Fancy, owned by the writer, on seven; Oonan, six; Toltec’s Fancy, four. Only one other cow in the United States, of co-temporaneous age, competes with them with six, this cow Erotas.

It is also to be noted that No. 1 of the team of twenty-five champion over own team, the champion cow of all breeds at the World’s Fair, is a descendant from cattle owned, bred and developed by old Tennessee breeders. I do not mean, of course, that she is composed entirely of this blood, but she takes her line directly back from Chemical Test bred in Tennessee, son of Toltec’s Fancy, that in turn was daughter of Landseer’s Fancy. So carrying the blood of Tormentor, Landseer’s Fancy and Oonan.

Then permit an old breeder to make the suggestion that what has been done once could be done now even to greater advantage if taken up and the proper amount of energy, zeal and intelligence bestowed upon it. Prices would again revive and Jersey interests in Tennessee would again develop. Why should young breeders of the country neglect the natural advantages we have, backed by experience and the development of the breed already accomplished? I think if there ever was a time that is exceedingly favorable for this industry it is now.

Commencing with Landseer’s Fancy, then giving about thirty pounds of milk per day, which made under test 14 pounds 6 ounces in one week, I fed and developed her through a long series of years, using more and more concentrated food and less bran, until in the end she was capable of digesting two gallons at a feed, equal parts corn and oats, with one-half gallon of bran (pure wheat bran), and when making her maximum amount of butter—29 pounds one-half ounce—was giving only from twenty to twenty-three pounds of milk per day, and subsequently went as low as seventeen or eighteen pounds of milk per day, holding her own with regard to the butter. So it will be seen that from the commencement she lost in quantity of milk, but under such feed gained in butter. Her milk was so remarkably rich as also her daughter, Toltec’s Fancy’s milk, that, for a long time having the test questioned notwithstanding the fact that she had always proven by repeated official tests all claims made for her, finally resorted to glass jars made of heavy glassware wherein her whole milk was placed after each milking and placed under seal as usual in official tests so that when lifted from the water the line of cream and milk would be seen, and it was demonstrated that it was almost entirely cream, being about three-fourths to seven-eighths cream. This cow was exceptional, or I might say, her whole family was exceptional in such remarkable rich production. But she handed down to her descendants the same tendency to richness in other hands long years afterwards. She has two sons with over seventy daughters in the honor roll of the Jerseys, and five daughters all in the fourteen-pound class and upwards, and it would be hard to give a list of her descendants in the fourteen-pound class. I should say something over two hundred. This cow, with others handled by me, was fed according to the capacity of each cow to digest the corn and oats ground together, with grass, hay and running water at will. On this point I cannot too strongly emphasize the fact that Tennessee is better located and supplied with running water than any place I have ever seen. With all the bluegrass and other facilities of Kentucky, Ohio, Illinois and Indiana, they lack running water for the cows to drink and the running water to set the milk in.

I have tried every known experiment in raising the cream on the milk for the best results, but in all I have ever tried I have never found anything equal to the stone spring-house with wire gauze over the windows to keep out all insects, ceiled overhead with plank (not plastered), and set the milk in jars, either stone or glass, when first drawn from the cow warm, in the water about 56 to 59 degrees temperature. The temperature of the milk soon becomes the same temperature as the water and remains stationary until all the cream is raised in the milk. The current of water keeps the air in the spring-house fresh and clean and every facility is given for the production of butter.

In building the various spring-houses that I used on the different farms at different times, I always used what is known as the test-room, about six feet wide across the entire spring-house, a wall of brick or stone cemented inside and out, with only one door and window in the same, both of which could be placed under seal by any committee called to test the cattle at any time, or used by myself and manager in making private tests, so that the milk of the cow under test could be kept absolutely untampered with by any person. And the tests made by me were made in this way and verified by various committees and also by chemical analysis. So that when I went out of breeding Jerseys I know that I had more official tests than any Jersey breeder, and probably at one time as much as all combined.

I believe in the theory that especial families of Jerseys are capable of being fed so as to grow richer after long continued feed. Some will not. There is a limit that will be found in nearly all of them.

In testing cattle it was always my purpose to ascertain the maximum of food capable of being digested by any cow under test, and fall slightly below this quantity of feed so as to keep her appetite always whetted.

Another point was that she be fed regularly and preferably, not over twice a day with concentrated foods, and thus giving the stomach all the time to do its work. I have seen many a test disturbed by feeding only a small amount of grain at the dinner time out of order. It disturbs the entire digesting of the animals and will probably throw them off a day or two. When undisturbed, the same cow will come up at night and take her regular feed and not be disturbed in her test at all. It may be thought that this is going into detail too much, but small details sometimes have wonderful influence in handling any animal. A horse may be just on edge for a race and some small circumstance occur that disturbs it. So with the wonderful mechanism of the cow making her four pounds of butter per day, she must be handled very carefully.

But it may be said, what profit is there in all this? My reply is that if Landseer’s Fancy had not been tested as she was and thoroughly developed her descendants might have passed unnoticed and we would have been none the wiser as to the capabilities of this family. I have taken her as an instance because more familiar with her history than others, and because she was the hub around which the herd revolved. I paid $175 for her, and, on calculation of her descendants owned by me and sold to others, she realized nearly $30,000 without any calculation as to her milk and butter. She entered into and formed the web and woof of what was known as The Columbia Jersey Cattle Company’s herd. She was sold subsequently when that corporation was wound up to Messrs. Webster and Morrow and entered the great herd at Nashville.

This Columbia Jersey Cattle Company organized with a capital stock of $20,000, paid a dividend of 14 per cent or over per annum, and the stock was retired at par with all debts paid; one of the most successful of all Jersey cattle enterprises I was ever in. I think the last year, with about thirty working cows and the dairy receipts of thirty-six hundred dollars and over and the sales of calves and cattle from the herd, with the herd products and heifers added, was something over ten thousand dollars.

It was then located at Indian Camp Springs, about three miles from Columbia and an ideal place for a spring-house, the spring being about fifty nine feet above the spring-house and coming to the spring-house through a four inch pipe, but the water had to be cut off so that it would run slowly into the spring-house, and when we wanted to work the butter in the churn it would be turned on into the hose and the butter thoroughly washed.

Young breeders cannot adopt a better formula for feed than the one I have suggested, which is cheap also in the long run, for it is a farm product and it is not necessary to buy on the market, but it can be produced on the farm. Besides this, no cow will stand commercial feed as she will this corn and oats in equal parts. It is nearer suited to nature and she can stand this feed longer without injury than any commercial food. When I say corn and oats in equal parts I mean bushel for bushel mixed and ground together. If any one will think a minute there is nothing deleterious in this food. You can get it absolutely pure, whereas if you go to market to buy bran to feed the cattle on you do not know what you are getting, sometimes the sweeping of the mill floor and any old waste the miller is pleased to throw off. The Jersey breeder ought essentially to be a farmer and raise on his own farm what his herd consumes and thus market the products of the farm.

In The Open

(Note.—Under this head communications are invited from
the open—of gun, dog and rod—stories of hunting, fishing,
traveling, etc.—Ed.)

A PRAIRIE CHICKEN HUNT IN NORTH DAKOTA.

By Trotwood.

Every citizen of this great republic should travel over his own country. He will be amazed at its greatness, and his prejudices and local conceits, if he have any breadth at all, will grow fewer the further he goes, and learns that the world cares nothing for the petty environments and embroilments of his own bailiwick.

The most attractive country in the Northwest is the great prairies of the Dakotas. I thought I had some idea of their immensity, of their greatness, until for one solid day and night I raced across them by fast express, and saw by day the pillar of their cloud of smokestacks—for it was harvest time—on each side, as far as the boundless horizon, and each cloud a thresher from whose funnel poured the wheat of the nation.

There is something in mere land to me—any kind of land—soil, you may call it—dirt—I care not what. But I love it just as I hate brick walls and city pavements. There is something about it, from the rocks and hills to the level, plowed valleys, that is clean and good. It means independence and honesty and clean living. It may not mean shrewdness and polish and that smart education which comes from living by one’s wits in a great walled-in home of wits, but it means independence and the rest that made Shakespeare.

When I saw the Dakotas, I wondered how the white man had stayed away from them as long as he had. Perhaps it were better for the staying, starving, striving quality of our forefathers that this grand garden spot of the Northwest lay hid between the mountains and the sea, instead of stretching up and down the coast. It were better for their children that fathers should toil in sand and flint. It puts flint into the children—steel—gameness—the spirit to do.

One generation of striving poverty makes flint; two, steel; three, well, you have heard of Andrew Jackson, of Lincoln, perhaps. Study the poverty of their pedigrees, for it takes poverty to make a pedigree.

The first immigrants to our shores came solely for gold, it is said. What kind of a republic would we have to-day if they had landed on the Pacific slope of gold instead of the Atlantic slope of rocks?

And yet, America is run over with people to-day who think that gold is everything. They think it so hard that the land is filled with trusts and steals and the things which breed greed and guilt. They should learn—they must learn—that, as the making of money is the lowest of all human talents—the talent of self first, which is the lowest instinct of all life—so is its talent for getting the lowest, meanest of all talents. “All my life,” says Edison, “I have been trying to keep away from mean people who make money.”

Fargo I found to be a beautiful and prosperous city, and the soil of the country around it, as it had been for two hundred miles, truly a glory and an inspiration. If this land had the climate of the South it could feed the world. As it is, Nature, who adjusts herself to environments, acts quickly here, and I was surprised at the stories of its productiveness in the short season it had. Nay, mine own eye beheld it, for never had I seen such wheat, barley and small grain, such cabbage, beets, turnips, vegetables of all kinds.

There was a greatness and vastness everywhere. As far as the eye could see, even beyond the rim of the horizon, it was vast—vast. And that always affects me peculiarly. After I have seen as far as the eye will reach, I become homesick. I have a sacred, sad longing to see and go farther and uplift the veil.

I rejoiced in the fact that there were no trees, no high hills, nothing to break the great canvas of vastness—a bivouac of eternity dotted with millions of camps of wheat shocks, fringed with the splendor of a vast, pure sky, and framed in the purpling splendor of a horizon of blue and gold. The little ten acre lots of dwarf trees the Government has forced the settlers to plant, I liked them not. They were warts, merely, on the brow of Eternity. The great, rich, boundless, beautiful prairies were there as God had Intended them to be—Nature’s handiwork, with splendid harmony in its whole.

No picture ever painted has equalled it—for Nature never makes a mistake in her pictures. She never sticks a bunch of dwarf trees where the great, grand prairies should roll away.

There is but little difference between the Dakota prairies and the ocean. The difference is that only between the imagination and the fact. And looking over them, standing in them, seeing the ceaseless waves rippling across the seas of wheat or the white caps come spinning from the uplifted heads of them, again and again I caught myself repeating Byron’s lines:

“Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty’s form
Glasses itself in tempests, in all time,
Calm or convulsed, in breeze or gale or storm,
Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime
Dark heaving;—boundless, endless and sublime—
The image of Eternity—the throne
Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime
The monsters of the deep are made; each zone
Obeys thee; thou goest forth, dread fathomless, alone.”

Lisbon is a beautiful little town, and one comes upon it so suddenly it is a surprise. For hours nothing but the grand, great prairies, billowed in wheat waves, smoke-plumed with thresher stacks. Then down you go into a beautiful valley—the valley of the Cheyenne, and nestling on its banks clean, church-spired, sits this up-to-date town.

I landed in good luck there, for I had anticipated the pleasure of meeting old friends and relatives—a cousin whom my mother had reared and who to me had always been a sister—but I had the additional good luck to fall into the hands of Mr. Geo. W. Ferguson, the county treasurer, and the owner of Raymond S. by Montevideo, the handsomest young trotting sire it has been my good fortune to see in any State. And I found the blooded stock interest alive and growing in all that section, and surely no place under the skies has a better license to rear them. In the hands of Mr. Ferguson and Mr. W. B. Stone, the county game-warden, I realized one of the dreams of my life—a prairie chicken shoot. If you have never indulged in one, go a thousand miles to Dakota—and every year will find you wanting to go again. It was a bright, crisp morning in September, and Mr. Stone’s beautiful setter bitch was good and fit. I had been out early to see some threshers at work in the wheat, and a little shower coming up I had gotten wet. This in the South would have meant two hours’ dampness, and a cold, but imagine my surprise, in a short while, to find the ground dry and myself with it, very dry! In the rarefied air of this great country I do not believe one can get wet unless he is foolish enough to drink water.

Mr. Ferguson met me later with his surrey and two spanking red-sorrel trotting mares, as well bred as Raymond S, and away we went across the prairie after the chickens. The ride itself was pleasure enough—forever going through that beautiful black loam, as tempting to the eye of the man who loves the soil as a cobwebbed bottle or a fat capon to the stomach of a priest. For it was bespangled with red berries, ripe heads of flax, golden stubbles of wheat and oats and barley, red grasses finer than ever bluegrass grows to be and richer than all tame blades.

My first covey is pictured forever in my mind. The bitch came to a staunch stand near a low, marshy place, where the grass was blue green and studded with fall flowers. On all sides were shocks of wheat, and away in the distance the interminable smokestacks of busy threshers. I walked up and took it all in—I stamped the picture forever on my mind. I wanted it there that I might always see it—the very clouds, the distant horizon, the golden stubble-blades, the very silence that hangs like a benediction over the land. And all over it and above everything that beautiful Llewellyn bitch, frozen in living marble before me.

“Is it possible,” I thought, “that nothing is between these birds and me but the air?” No pines of Alabama and Mississippi, no thickets on the creeks of Louisiana, no wooded lots and big hills of Tennessee, no barb-wire fence with hideous signs stuck up warning me that some hog lived there on posted land? All my life I had shot quail under those conditions. Now—now—nothing but me and the pure, clear air and the boundless, rolling prairies and that dog of marble waiting for the word, to flush a dozen prairie hens squatting in the stubble ready to rise with a cyclone’s rush on wings of thunder. I stood frozen—like the dog. I could not move. My heart beat like a race-horse in the back stretch, making me take long breaths and swallow hard as I came to the hunter’s attention. Then!—

Never arose before mortal man so thrilling a sight. They sucked me forward like the gust of a passing express, like the roar of a wind storm, like the burst of sun from a cloud, thunder-lined. The earth of stubble quivered to their wings of thunder and the air pulsed like a man-of-war when the big guns bellow to port.

But I did not forget to fire—oh, no! Man is a killing animal by instinct, and a hog by nature, and neither poetry nor romance nor the wild glory of the great fields can stop him from killing when his killing blood is up and his stomach is at stake. Yes, I fired—once—twice—and I shot to kill. Two beautiful ones I picked with lightning glance from the splendid covey—two glorious ones that fairly split the air in the wild joy of escape, only suddenly to—

Well, “the rest is silence,” as Shakespeare said, when Hamlet died, and it is the same death that will come to you and me—the end will be just as sudden, whether we fall in the mid-day of life or fall to the slow fever of age. They fell but ten feet apart and I walked up and looked down on them—the proud, beautiful creatures now limp and lifeless.