In the following pages I shall tell of much personal experience as well as important incidents which have come under my observation during thirty years on the frontier. As a cowboy, miner and pioneer, I have participated in many exciting events, none of which, however, caused me the prolonged grief that a certain bombshell affair did when I was a boy, resulting in a newspaper experience and habit of telling things, and eventually led to my coming West.My grandfather’s plantation in Kentucky and nearly opposite the town of Newburgh, on the Indiana side, was as much my home as was my mother’s. She being a widow and having my brother and sister to care for, as[2] well as myself, felt a relief from the responsibility of looking after me when I was at my grandfather’s home.The plantation faced the Ohio River, the wooded part of which had been a camping ground for rebel soldiers, until they were driven out by the shells of a Yankee gunboat. While hunting pecans in these woods one day, I stumbled on to an unexploded bombshell, and, boylike, I wanted to see the thing go off. However, I was afraid to touch it until I had counseled with the Woods boys, whose father was a renter of a small tract of ground below the plantation. That night the three of us met and decided to explode the shell the following Sunday morning, after the folks had gone to church. I feigned a headache when grandmother wanted to take me in the carriage with them to church, but when I was satisfied they were well down the road, I hurried to the strip of forest a mile away, where the Woods boys were waiting. They had come in a rickety old buggy drawn by a white mule. It was in autumn and as the leaves were dry on the ground, we were afraid to kindle a fire, and decided to take the shell near the tobacco barn, around which we could[3] hide and watch it go off. Neither of the boys would handle it, so I lifted it into the buggy; then they were afraid to ride with it, and it was left to me to lead the mule to the tobacco barn. I hitched the animal to a sapling near the barn, while the other boys gathered up some kindling, and we made a pile of old fence posts, and when I had laid the shell upon the log heap, we lit the kindling with a match and all ran behind the barn, forgetting all about the mule. The wood was dry and was soon all aflame. Every little while one of us would peek around the corner to see if the thing was not about ready to explode. We were getting impatient, when the mule gave a great “hee haw” that called our attention to his peril. It was his last “hee haw,” for in a second more the bomb exploded with a deafening noise, and fragments of the shell screamed like a panther in the air. We ran around to see the result of the explosion, and behold! it had spread that mule all over the side of the barn.The things my grandfather said and did to me when he returned from church does not concern the public. But when he had finished, I was fully convinced that I was all to[4] blame, and that I owed Mr. Woods $150 for his demolished mule.Then followed long lectures from my mother and grandmother, and to add to my discomfiture was Mr. Woods’ lamentations and his expressed regrets that it was not me, instead of his mule, that was blown up.I was the owner of an old musket with which I spent most of my time hunting rabbits, using small slugs of lead for shot, which I chopped up with a hatchet. Two weeks before the bombshell episode, I had found a musket-ball, and I concluded to try a man’s load in the gun on my next rabbit; I poured in a full charge of powder, but when I came to ram the ball home, it would go only half way down the barrel. I was afraid to shoot then, lest the gun might burst, and as I could neither get the ball out or farther down, I laid the barrel between two logs, tied a string to the trigger, and got behind a stump and pulled it off.A few minutes later while I was examining my gun, grandfather came running out of the potato patch to find who was shooting at him. However, he was so thankful that matters[5] were not worse, that I got off with a slight reprimand.But this Sunday capped the climax. A council of my kinfolks was held that night, and decided that neither man nor beast was safe on that plantation if I remained. Their final verdict was that I should be sent to my mother’s home in Newburgh, and there to learn the printer’s trade, attend Frederick Dickerman’s night school, be made to pay for the mule, and my musket confiscated. I was paid $3 a week as printer’s devil to start with, one dollar of which I might spend for my clothes, fifty cents for tuition in the night school, one dollar and twenty-five cents for the mule debt, and the other twenty-five cents I might spend.
