United States or Bahrain ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Reelfoot is, and has always been, a lake of mystery. In places it is bottomless.
But the Reelfoot country has its uses. It is the best game and fish country, natural or artificial, that is left in the South today. In their appointed seasons the duck and the geese flock in, and even semi-tropical birds, like the brown pelican and the Florida snake-bird, have been known to come there to nest.
This Reelfoot was a large bear whose cunning had defied our best hunters for five or six years. He got his name from the fact that he "reeled" or twisted his hind feet in walking, as some horses do, leaving a peculiar track. This seems rather common among old bears, for I have known of several "reelfoots" in other, and widely separated, regions. Cable and his dogs were sent for.
How these edible sorts live to spawn and how their spawn in turn live to spawn again is a marvel, seeing how many of the big fish-eating cannibal fish there are in Reelfoot.
Monarch enjoys the enviable distinction of being the largest captive bear in the world. N. Y. Tribune, March 8, 1903. The most famous bear in the world was, is and will continue to be the gigantic Grizzly known variously on the Pacific Slope as "Old Brin," "Clubfoot," and "Reelfoot."
The ceremony of deducting this sum took place at the Planters' Bank, whither the two had journeyed in company from the courthouse. Having, with the aid of the paying teller, instructed O'Day in the technical details requisite to the drawing of personal checks, Judge Priest went home and had his bag packed, and left for Reelfoot Lake to spend a week fishing.
Of course he was called "Old Clubfoot" and "Reelfoot" by people who did not know him, just as every big Grizzly has been called in California since the clubfooted-bear myth became part of the folk lore of the Golden State, but his feet were all sound and whole. The Clubfoot legend is another story and has nothing to do with the big bear of the Castac.
These are monstrous creatures, these catfish of Reelfoot scaleless, slick things, with corpsy, dead eyes and poisonous fins like javelins and long whiskers dangling from the sides of their cavernous heads.
Include as a factor Hyman by all means, for lacking him our chain of chancy coincidence would lack a most vital link. At Reelfoot Lake many black bass, bronze-backed and big-mouthed, meet the happy fate which all true anglers wish for them; and the white perch do bite with a whole-souled enthusiasm only equaled by the whole-souled enthusiasm with which also the mosquitoes bite.
The break, however, did not relieve the river situation at other points, because the water running through the break there was turned back to the main stream by the Government or Reelfoot levee, two miles below the town. The section flooded was occupied by several factories and the homes of hundreds of workmen. All along the Mississippi men were at work strengthening the levees.