Chapter IV: Part 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

M. R. HIGBEE.

The Truth About Horseshoeing.

Editor Trotwood’s:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LA FORGE.

Pecatonica, Ill.

TROTWOOD’S MONTHLY

Devoted to Farm, Horse and Home.

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

JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE,
Editor-in-Chief.

E. E. SWEETLAND Business Manager.

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

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

NASHVILLE, TENN., MAY, 1906.

With Trotwood

Human Registration.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here it is:

Trotwood’s Human Standard.

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

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

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

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

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

5. Geniuses, however cranky.

6. The father and mother of a genius.

Non-Standard.

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

1. Old bachelors from choice.

2. Cranks.

3. Liars.

4. The impure.

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

6. The children of impure married women.

7. Society people wherever found and their one child.

8. Married men who lead germans.

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

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

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

12. Dialect poets.

13. Praying lawyers.

14. Bank cashiers who run Sunday-schools.

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

16. The last three ought really to be damned.

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

Given under the hand and seal, stamped and delivered by

TROTWOOD.

Old Wash’s Ma.

Editor Trotwood’s:

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

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

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

“Auntie, do you remember George Washington?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

E. J. FERGUSON.

Washington, Pa.

Trotwood’s Travels

LITTLE JOURNEYS THROUGH THE SOUTH—FLORENCE ALABAMA.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“October 29th, 1795.

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

[Signed] “Andrew Jackson.”

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

Florence is full of history, and history that counts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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