Great American Horse Stories

by Sharon B. Smith

  After that he was petted even more than before. He might browse as he chose about his master’s house, or stand at the veranda whinnying softly for the caresses and attentions he had grown to love.

  But “Traveller” did not long survive his master.

  One June day following General Lee’s death he was browsing about the yard, and, seeing someone on the piazza, advanced whinnying for the petting and the lump of sugar he always expected. It was noticed that he was slightly lame. General Lee’s son examined the lame hoof and found a very small nail in it. The nail was extracted. The wound it left was very slight, and did not even bleed, and nothing more was thought of the matter.

  In the course of a few days the hostler reported that “Traveller” was not well. There was no veterinary surgeon in Lexington, but a physician was summoned who found that the horse was suffering from lockjaw. The two physicians who had attended General Lee in his last illness now devoted themselves to his famous warhorse. His sufferings were great. All that skill and devotion could do to relieve them was done. When he was no longer able to stand, a mattress was laid on the stable floor for him.

  The little town of Lexington was deeply sympathetic. Not only the people of the town, but the farmers of the neighborhood as well, came to offer suggestions and condolences. But nothing was of any avail. The good warhorse died very shortly, beloved and mourned by all who had known him.

  As long as General Lee’s name is remembered that of his gray warhorse “Traveller” will be lovingly associated with it. Nor will it be only an association of names. The qualities which have endeared General Lee to so many—courage, bravery, gentleness, fidelity, and fortitude—these qualities were shared by “Traveller,” the friend and companion and faithful servant of his master, and for these things he too shall be remembered.

  10

  How Miss Lake’s Circus Horses Were Restored

  by Thomas Wallace Knox

  The Lake family, performers and part owners of a traveling circus, kept themselves busy and their audiences entertained during the Civil War. They had little regard for the political and military circumstances of the places they visited. Then, in Nashville in December of 1864, an occupying Federal force under General James H. Wilson turned the circus upside down. Fifteen-year-old Alice Lake was the one to put it upright again.

  Here is the story of Alice and her circus horses, as told by the journalist Thomas Wallace Knox. He served in the Civil War, but probably did not hear this story firsthand, since he was wounded and discharged during the first months of the war. Knox specialized in adventure stories for boys, but the story of Alice Lake certainly appealed to girls as well.

  One of the stories told during the evening was about the seizure of some circus horses in Nashville, Tennessee, at the time of the American Civil War. Lake and North’s Circus was performing there during the winter of 1864, while the town was held by the Northern army and threatened by the Confederates.

  At 9 o’clock on the morning of the 6th of December the company was in the practice ring, drilling for a new grand entry. They had nineteen ring horses, including three black stallions, which Miss Lake, the daughter of one of the proprietors, used to drive in a manège act, and which she had trained herself on her father’s Kentucky farm, and loved as a Kentucky girl will love her horses.

  The band had just finished the first bar when in stalked an officer of the army, and called Lake aside. “You have nineteen horses here, I see,” he said; “one of them is lame; we don’t want him, but the others are confiscated. Rather a fine lot. Suppose we say a hundred apiece for them.”

  Then he made out a requisition on the Treasury for $1800—handed it to Lake, called in his men, and in five minutes left the company with a show on its hands and only one lame horse to do all the equestrian business.

  Miss Lake cried and some of the men used hard language, but all the same, for four days they gave a show twice a day with that one lame horse. Then Miss Lake got desperate. She was a mere girl, and with a girl’s audacity she did a thing which an older person would have considered the wildest folly.

  “John,” she said to the clown, “I’m going to General Wilson to get my horses. I want them and they want me.”

  Nothing that anybody could say would hold her back, and so away she went to General Wilson’s headquarters. She marched in on General Wilson and asked for her horses back. She had a sweet and winning way, and when she cried and told him how heartsick she was for her horses, and how much she knew they missed her, the general let his feelings get the better of his sense of duty, and gave her an order for every horse taken from the circus.

  One of Wilson’s orderlies afterwards gave a reason for giving the horses back, which, while it is not so romantic, may be partly true. The horses were all trained for ring service and most of them were trained to dance to the music, and to fall upon their knees and sides upon being touched upon the haunches with a spur or the whip.

  The whole bunch was turned over to a military band as their mounts, and the orderly said that during the four days that the band was mounted on those beasts there was not an hour when one of them was not dancing around so that he could not keep time, or else horse and man—sometime three or four of them—were rolling on the ground together, the musicians having unwittingly given the horse his lying down cue.

  Three years later the now eighteen-year-old Alice Lake, traveling by steamer between Mobile, Alabama, and New Orleans, fell overboard and drowned. Observers speculated that she became dizzy while looking into the water. Others doubted that, since she could twirl on a galloping horse without a problem.

  Alice’s mother Agnes continued her career as a circus equestrienne, eventually becoming the first American woman to own a circus. In 1876 Agnes suffered a second tragedy when her recently acquired husband Wild Bill Hickok was murdered in Deadwood, Dakota Territory. The avalanche of publicity surrounding Wild Bill’s death helped bury the public memory of Alice Lake, who is mostly forgotten today.

  11

  A Ride with a Mad Horse in a Freight-Car

  by W. H. H. Murray

  Beyond his religion, clergyman William Henry Harrison Murray loved two things above all: the Adirondack Mountains of New York and horses. Publication of his 1869 book Adventures in the Wilderness, a collection of essays and stories about events and life in the mountains of Northeastern New York, marked the beginning of outdoor writing in North America. The book’s success earned him the nickname of “Adirondack” Murray. His book The Perfect Horse followed in 1873. This massive volume on horse selection and training is still used today.

  The two loves of W. H. H. Murray came together in the short story that anchored Adventures in the Wilderness. “A Ride with a Mad Horse in a Freight-Car” is considered Murray’s masterpiece, even though it takes place in circumstances he never experienced himself and features a relationship between a horse and a man that is somewhat improbable. But it is still a remarkably moving story, one that perfectly expresses the potential for love between a human being and a horse.

  Should the reader ever visit the south inlet of Racquette Lake—one of the loveliest bits of water in the Adirondack wilderness—at the lower end of the pool below the falls, on the left-hand side going up, he will see the charred remnants of a campfire. It was there that the following story was first told—told, too, so graphically, with such vividness, that I found little difficulty, when writing it out from memory two months later, in recalling the exact words of the narrator in almost every instance.

  It was in the month of July, 1868, that John and I, having located our permanent camp on Constable’s Point, were lying off and on, as sailors say, about the lake, pushing our explorations on all sides out of sheer love of novelty and abhorrence of idleness. We were returning, late one afternoon of a hot, sultry day, from a trip to Shedd Lake, a lonely, out-of-the-way spot which few sportsmen have ever visited, and had reached the falls
on South Inlet just after sunset. As we were getting short of venison, we decided to lie by awhile and float down the river on our way to camp, in hope of meeting a deer. To this end we had gone ashore at this point, and, kindling a small fire, were waiting for denser darkness. We had barely started the blaze, when the tap of a carelessly handled paddle against the side of a boat warned us that we should soon have company, and in a moment two boats glided around the curve below and were headed directly toward our bivouac. The boats contained two gentlemen and their guides. We gave them a cordial, hunter-like greeting, and, lighting our pipes, were soon engaged in cheerful conversation, spiced with story-telling. It might have been some twenty minutes or more when another boat, smaller than you ordinarily see even on those waters, containing only the paddler, came noiselessly around the bend below, and stood revealed in the reflection of the firelight. I chanced to be sitting in such a position as to command a full view of the curve in the river, or I should not have known of any approach, for the boat was so sharp and light, and he who urged it along so skilled at the paddle, that not a ripple, no, nor the sound of a drop of water falling from blade or shaft, betrayed the paddler’s presence.

  If there is anything over which I become enthusiastic, it is such a boat and such paddling. To see a boat of bark or cedar move through the water noiselessly as a shadow drifts across a meadow, no jar or creak above, no gurgling of displaced water below, no whirling and rippling wake astern, is something bordering so nearly on the weird and ghostly, that custom can never make it seem other than marvelous to me.

  Thus, as I sat half reclining, and saw that little shell come floating airily out of the darkness into the projection of the firelight, as a feather might come blown by the night-wind, I thought I had never seen a prettier or more fairylike sight. None of the party save myself were so seated as to look down stream, and I wondered which of the three guides would first discover the presence of the approaching boat.

  Straight on it came. Light as a piece of finest cork it sat upon and glided over the surface of the river; no dip and roll, no drip of falling water as the paddle shaft gently rose and sank. The paddler, whoever he might be, knew his art thoroughly. He sat erect and motionless. The turn of the wrists, and the easy elevation of his arms as he feathered his paddle, were the only movements visible. But for these the gazer might deem him a statue carved from the material of the boat, a mere inanimate part of it. I have boated much in bark canoe and cedar shell alike, and John and I have stolen on many a camp that never knew our coming or our going, with paddles which touched the water as snowflakes touch the earth; and well I knew, as I sat gazing at this man, that not one boatman, red man or white, in a hundred could handle a paddle like that.

  The quick ear of John, when the stranger was within thirty feet of the landing, detected the lightest possible touch of a lily pad against the side of the boat as it just grazed it glancing by, and his “hist” and sudden motion toward the river drew the attention of the whole surprised group thither. The boat glided to the sand so gently as barely to disturb a grain, and the paddler, noiseless in all his movements, stepped ashore and entered our circle.

  “Well, stranger,” said John, “I don’t know how long your fingers have polished a paddle shaft, but it isn’t every man who can push a boat up ten rods of open water within twenty feet of my back without my knowing it.”

  The stranger laughed pleasantly, and, without making any direct reply, lighted his pipe and joined in the conversation. He was tall in stature, wiry, and bronzed. An ugly cicatrice stretched on the left side of his face from temple almost down to chin. His eyes were dark gray, frank, and genial. I concluded at once that he was a gentleman, and had seen service. Before he joined us, we had been whiling away the time by story-telling, and John was at the very crisis of an adventure with a panther, when his quick ear detected the stranger’s approach. Explaining this to him, I told John to resume his story, which he did. Thus half an hour passed quickly, all of us relating some experience.

  At last I proposed that Mr. Roberts—for so we will call him—should entertain us; “and,” continued I, “if I am right in my surmise that you have seen service and been under fire, give us some adventure or incident which may have befallen you during the war.”

  He complied, and then and there, gentle reader, I heard from his lips the story, which, for the entertainment of friends, I afterward wrote out. It left a deep impression upon all who heard it around our campfire under the pines that night; and from the mind of one I know has never been erased the impression made by the story which I have named “A Ride with a Mad Horse in a Freight-Car.”

  “Well,” said the stranger, as he loosened his belt and stretched himself in an easy, recumbent position, “it is not more than fair that I should throw something into the stock of common entertainment; but the story I am to tell you is a sad one, and I fear will not add to the pleasure of the evening. As you desire it, however, and it comes in the line of the request that I would narrate some personal episode of the war, I will tell it, and trust the impression will not be altogether unpleasant.

  “It was at the battle of Malvern Hill—a battle where the carnage was more frightful, as it seems to me, than in any this side of the Alleghenies during the whole war—that my story must begin. I was then serving as major in the ——th Massachusetts Regiment—the old ——th, as we used to call it, and a bloody time the boys had of it too. About 2 P. M. we had been sent out to skirmish along the edge of the wood in which, as our generals suspected, the Rebs lay massing for a charge across the slope, upon the crest of which our army was posted. We had barely entered the underbrush when we met the heavy formations of Magruder in the very act of charging. Of course, our thin line of skirmishers was no impediment to those onrushing masses. They were on us and over us before we could get out of the way. I do not think that half of those running, screaming masses of men ever knew that they had passed over the remnants of as plucky a regiment as ever came out of the old Bay State.

  “But many of the boys had good reason to remember that afternoon at the base of Malvern Hill, and I among the number; for when the last line of Rebs had passed over me, I was left among the bushes with the breath nearly trampled and an ugly bayonet gash through my thigh; and mighty little consolation was it for me at that moment to see the fellow who run me through lying stark dead at my side, with a bullet hole in his head, his shock of coarse black hair matted with blood, and his stony eyes looking into mine.

  “Well, I bandaged up my limb the best I might, and started to crawl away, for our batteries had opened, and the grape and canister that came hurtling down the slope passed but a few feet over my head. It was slow and painful work, as you can imagine, but at last, by dint of perseverance, I had dragged myself away to the left of the direct range of the batteries, and, creeping to the verge of the wood, looked off over the green slope. I understood by the crash and roar of the guns, the yells and cheers of the men, and that hoarse murmur which those who have been in battle know, but which I cannot describe in words, that there was hot work going on out there; but never have I seen, no, not in that three days’ desperate mêlée at the Wilderness, nor at that terrific repulse we had at Cold Harbor, such absolute slaughter as I saw that afternoon on the green slope of Malvern Hill.

  “The guns of the entire army were massed on the crest, and thirty thousand of our infantry lay, musket in hand, in front. For eight hundred yards the hill sank in easy declension to the wood, and across this smooth expanse the Rebs must charge to reach our lines. It was nothing short of downright insanity to order men to charge that hill; and so his generals told Lee, but he would not listen to reason that day, and so he sent regiment after regiment, and brigade after brigade, and division after division, to certain death. Talk about Grant’s disregard of human life, his effort at Cold Harbor—and I ought to know, for I got a minie in my shoulder that day—was hopeful and easy work to what Lee laid on Hill’s and Magruder’s di
visions at Malvern.

  “It was at the close of the second charge, when the yelling mass reeled back from before the blaze of those sixty guns and thirty thousand rifles, even as they began to break and fly backward toward the woods, that I saw from the spot where I lay a riderless horse break out of the confused and flying mass, and, with mane and tail erect and spreading nostril, come dashing obliquely down the slope. Over fallen steeds and heaps of the dead she leaped with a motion as airy as that of the flying fox when, fresh and unjaded, he leads away from the hounds, whose sudden cry has broken him off from hunting mice amid the bogs of the meadow. So this riderless horse came vaulting along.

  “Now from my earliest boyhood I have had what horsemen call a ‘weakness’ for horses. Only give me a colt of wild, irregular temper and fierce blood to tame, and I am perfectly happy. Never did lash of mine, singing with cruel sound through the air, fall on such a colt’s soft hide. Never did yell or kick send his hot blood from heart to head deluging his sensitive brain with fiery currents, driving him to frenzy or blinding him with fear; but touches, soft and gentle as a woman’s, caressing words, and oats given from the open palm, and unfailing kindness, were the means I used to ‘subjugate’ him. Sweet subjugation, both to him who subdues and to him who yields! The wild, unmannerly, and unmanageable colt, the fear of horsemen the country round, finding in you, not an enemy but a friend, receiving his daily food from you, and all those little ‘nothings’ which go as far with a horse as a woman, to win and retain affection, grows to look upon you as his protector and friend, and testifies in countless ways his fondness for you.

  “So when I saw this horse, with action so free and motion so graceful, amid that storm of bullets, my heart involuntarily went out to her, and my feelings rose higher and higher at every leap she took from amid the whirlwind of fire and lead. And as she plunged at last over a little hillock out of range and came careering toward me as only a riderless horse might come, her head flung wildly from side to side, her nostrils widely spread, her flank and shoulders flecked with foam, her eye dilating, I forgot my wound and all the wild roar of battle, and, lifting myself involuntarily to a sitting posture as she swept grandly by, gave her a ringing cheer.