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Updated: June 22, 2025
Then, the time of the first fishes came, and the other animals looked on them in awe and wonder as the Indians eyed Columbus. They were like the gar-pike in our Western rivers, only much larger, as big as a stove-pipe, and with a crust as hard as a turtle's shell. Then there came sharks, of strange forms, savage and ferocious, with teeth like bowie-knives.
On more than one occasion, the sailors on one side to the number of two or three hundred, and the Kentucky and Tennessee boatmen of equal or superior numbers on the other, were drawn up in battle array, and commenced a desperate contest with hard knuckles, bludgeons, and missiles of every description, revolvers and bowie-knives had not at that time been introduced into such MELEES, when the military made their appearance, and the belligerents were dispersed.
Such a burrowing into the hold for trunks that had lain buried for weeks, yes for months; such a hurrying to and fro above decks and below; such a riotous system of packing and unpacking; such a littering up of the cabins with shirts and skirts, and indescribable and unclassable odds and ends; such a making up of bundles, and setting apart of umbrellas, green spectacles and thick veils; such a critical inspection of saddles and bridles that had never yet touched horses; such a cleaning and loading of revolvers and examining of bowie-knives; such a half-soling of the seats of pantaloons with serviceable buckskin; then such a poring over ancient maps; such a reading up of Bibles and Palestine travels; such a marking out of routes; such exasperating efforts to divide up the company into little bands of congenial spirits who might make the long and arduous Journey without quarreling; and morning, noon and night, such mass-meetings in the cabins, such speech-making, such sage suggesting, such worrying and quarreling, and such a general raising of the very mischief, was never seen in the ship before!
This was Price's army, but Price had gone ahead into Kansas to beg the great McCulloch and his Confederates to come to their aid and save the state. "Dear mother, I wish that you and Jinny and Uncle Comyn could have seen this country rabble. How you would have laughed, and cried, because we are just like them. In the combined army two thousand have only bowie-knives or clubs.
Like their leader, they were full-blooded Mexicans, with enormous mustaches, and long, tangled hair, which looked as though it had never seen a comb. They were dressed in gay-colored clothes blue jackets, buckskin pants, very wide at the knee, and covered with buttons, ribbons, and gold lace. They wore long sashes around their waists, which were thrust full of bowie-knives and revolvers.
He returned to his store, but was soon summoned into the street again, by a complaint that the constable and his troop of slaveholders were very roughly handling a colored man, saying he had no business to keep in their vicinity. When Friend Hopper interfered, to prevent further abuse, several of the Southerners pointed bowie-knives and pistols at him.
This was bringing him very close to personal danger, for worthies of the class last mentioned were the sort who carried their pistols and bowie-knives prominently displayed and handy for use. As yet no actual violence had been attempted against him. Other methods of reprisal that came to his notice King published without comment as items of news.
The poets and editors, the bankers and merchants of New York vaguely remembered having read in their books that it was the home of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, the country of bowie-knives and pistols, of steamboat explosions and mobs, of wild speculation and the repudiation of State debts; and these half-forgotten impressions had lately been vividly recalled by a several years' succession of newspaper reports retailing the incidents of Border Ruffian violence and free-State guerrilla reprisals during the civil war in Kansas.
There was much that seems ludicrous as we recall it now. The youths of the community, imbued with the idea that "cold steel" would play an important part in the conflict, provided themselves with huge bowie-knives, fashioned by our home blacksmith, and with these fierce weapons swinging from their belts were much in evidence. There were already several organized military companies in the county.
But lo! the boy proves a young war-horse, neighing for battle, burning for gunpowder and guns, for bowie-knives and revolvers, and for every form and expression of physical force; he might make a splendid trapper, an energetic sea-captain, a bold, daring military man, but his whole boyhood is full of rebukes and disciplines for sins which are only the blind effort of the creature to express a nature which his parent does not and cannot understand.
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