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Updated: July 20, 2025
Tell them of cruel scourgings, of mutilations and brandings, of scenes of pollution and blood, of the banishment of all light and knowledge, and they affect to be greatly indignant at such enormous exaggerations, such wholesale misstatements, such abominable libels on the character of the southern planters! As if all these direful outrages were not the natural results of slavery!
Like the suicide lover in Mickiewicz's poem, who returns to life in the land of the Dead only to renew the dreadful suffering of his earth life, perhaps among all the emotions then so vividly felt there is not a single one which, could it again live, would reappear without the disfigurements, the brandings, the bruises, the mutilations, which were inflicted on its early beauty, which so deeply sullied its primal innocence!
Often it was Frances who rode the ranges, instead of Captain Rugley, viewing the different herds, receiving the reports of underforemen and wranglers, settling disputes between the punchers themselves, looking over chuck outfits, buying hay, overseeing brandings, and helping cut out fat steers for the market trail.
Most of my working being in the round ups and brandings, brand reading, and with large herds on the trail, as during my long experience in the cattle country I had traveled every known trail, and over immense stretches of country where there was no sign of a trail, nothing but the wide expanse of prairie; bare except for the buffalo grass, with here and there a lone tree or a giant cactus standing as a lone sentinel in the wildest of long stretches of grazing land rolling away in billows of hill and gully, like the waves of the ocean.
III. BRANDINGS, MAIMINGS, GUY-SHOT WOUNDS, &c. The slaves are often branded with hot irons, pursued with fire arms and shot, hunted with dogs and torn by them, shockingly maimed with knives, dirks, &c.; have their ears cut off, their eyes knocked out, their bones dislocated and broken with bludgeons, their fingers and toes cut off, their faces and other parts of their persons disfigured with scars and gashes, besides those made with the lash.
Dan and the Quiet Stockman, with a dozen or so of cattle "boys" to help them, had the year's musterings and brandings to get through; the Dandy would be wherever he was most needed; yard-building, yard-repairing, carting stores or lending a hand with mustering when necessity arose, while the Maluka would be everywhere at once, in organisation if not in body.
If fines, I reminded them, if imprisonments, grievous mutilations, and brandings of S.L. which I once called 'stigmata landis; but 'tis an ill subject for jesting could bespeak a true friend to liberty, why then sure I am one whose voice might well claim, a hearing.
The full horror of it came only a few years later, when I was big enough to go about to the native houses and among the gauchos in their gatherings, at cattle-partings and brandings, races, and on other occasions.
We want them to know that a knowledge of their whippings, their scourgings, their brandings, their chainings, is not confined to their plantations, but that some Negro of theirs has broken loose from his chains has burst through the dark incrustation of slavery, and is now exposing their deeds of deep damnation to the gaze of the christian people of England.
Then in the spring came the usual round ups, cuttings and brandings, during which time all our men were needed at the home ranch. I had long since developed into a first class cow boy and besides being chief brand reader in Arizona and the pan handle country.
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