The Cow-Hunter , livre ebook

THE COW-HUNTER
THE COW-HUNTER
A Novel
Charles Hudson

THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA PRESS
2014 Charles Hudson
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hudson, Charles.
The Cow-Hunter / Charles Hudson.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-61117-387-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-1-61117-388-8 (e-book) 1. Travelers-History-Fiction. 1. Title.
PS3608.U343C69 2014
813 .6-dc23
2013032139
To Joyce, my live-in editor and fiction coach, I dedicate this labor of love.
Deliver me from the sword, my forlorn life from the teeth of the dog. Save me from the lion s mouth, my poor life from the horns of wild bulls.
Psalm 22
As soon as the bulls caught sight of one another they pawed the earth so furiously that they sent the sods flying, and their eyes were like balls of fire in their heads; they locked their horns together, and they ploughed up the ground under them and trampled it, and they were trying to crush and destroy one another through the whole of the day.
And the White-horned went back a little way and made a rush at the Brown, and got his horn into his side, and he gave out a great bellow, and they rushed both together through the gap where Bricriu was, (and) he was trodden into the earth under their feet. And that is how Bricriu of the bitter tongue, son of Cairbre, got his death.
Lady Gregory (trans.), Chuchulain of Muirthemne , c. AD 700
I found these [cowpen] people, contrary to what a traveler might, perhaps, reasonably expect, from their occupation and remote situation from the capital or any commercial town, to be civil and courteous, and though educated as it were in the woods, no strangers to sensibility and those moral virtues which grace and ornament the most approved and admired characters in civil society.
William Bartram, Travels , 1791
CONTENTS
Preface
A Note on Charles Hudson
1 Mired
2 John MacDonald
3 Bad Air
4 Table Talk
5 The Cowpen
6 Topsy-Turvy
7 Rufus
8 Flea Bite Pen
9 Cut Nose
10 The Fragrance of Rosemary
11 Four Hole Swamp
12 Cow Thieves
13 Tending Herd
14 Christian Priber
15 The Deadening
16 The Logging Camp
17 The Pettiauger
18 Rice
19 Poke Greens
20 A Thousand Cuts
21 The Devil s Harem
22 To Market
23 A Foot in the Door
24 The Stranger
25 Will Shakespeare Should Be Here
Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Readings
PREFACE
This novel plays out in the setting of a little-known and long extinct American way of life, a forgotten world that was reconstructed most definitively by the historical geographer Terry Jordan in the 1980s and early 90s. Jordan made the case that the free-range cattle-herding culture of the American West was not born in the Western Plains; rather, it emerged from the womb of early eighteenth-century South Carolina. Here cattle-herding traditions from the British Isles, Spain, Africa, Jamaica, and Barbados were woven together into a culture for the tending of free-range cattle in the upland pine and wiregrass forest and swamp-cane environment of the Carolina backcountry, where these herders, always on the fringe of settled society, often invaded the very hunting grounds of Native American societies. These original cowboys lacked lariats, six-shooters, and pommels on their saddles, depending instead on flintlock guns, hatchets, long stock whips, and herd dogs. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the relentless spread of farms, plantations, and settlements had already begun pushing these frontier herders westward through the lower South and northward toward the Appalachian Mountains on their long migration toward what we know today as the American West. This cattle-herding culture adapted as it moved, making necessary changes and folding in new techniques along the way.
In these pages I have made every effort to accurately portray the historical, environmental, social, and cultural realities of these early eighteenth-century cattle herders in South Carolina. But all events and actions herein are fictional, including most of those played out by real historical persons, such as Dr. John Lining, James Adair, and Christian Priber. For readers who want to know the principal sources of my information, the meanings of archaic words, and the sources of the songs my characters sing and the stories they tell, such may be found in the Notes and Selected Readings in the back of the book.
Several archaic words need to be defined at the outset. In eighteenth-century Carolina, cattle ranches were called cowpens and cowboys were called cow-hunters. The owner or manager of a cowpen was often called a pinder, a word whose usage goes back at least to the medieval era in the British Isles and probably earlier, for the culture of cattle herding among Celtic- and English-speaking peoples is ancient.
A NOTE ON CHARLES HUDSON
My husband, Charles Hudson, died peacefully of a heart attack on June 8, 2013, while The Cow-Hunter was in press. He had finished final revisions of the manuscript, the copyediting had been completed, and he was happy to know that the book was headed into the design and production process. Meanwhile, he was busily at work on a sequel-he had finished a first chapter and started on a second-even though he knew that with his weakening heart he almost certainly would never finish this work. Charles was like Billy MacGregor: his mind had to be engaged in an intellectual challenge in order for him to feel fully alive.
Charles was as much a writer as he was a scholar. He was a stellar scholar and a leading authority on the anthropology and history of the native peoples of the southeastern United States. The best known of his many scholarly books are The Southeastern Indians , which is widely used as a textbook, and Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun: Hernando de Soto and the South s Ancient Chiefdoms . One of the marks of his scholarship is his clear and lively writing style, for he placed a particular value on sparkling prose. Even with his graduate students he emphasized the value of good writing alongside the value of good research, and he spent considerable time over the years helping his students polish their own prose styles.
Charles was a natural when it came to writing nonfiction, but as he explains in his acknowledgments, he found the writing of fiction to be a tougher assignment. He rose to the challenge, however, and gave his all to the perfecting of his new craft. In the end he was as pleased with what he had achieved in The Cow-Hunter as he was with all the highly acclaimed scholarship he had produced in his professional career. This book is indeed a most fitting cap to his lifelong mission as a scholar. His foremost goal was to transmit to the public the discoveries he had made about the interesting array of peoples whose worlds came together in the very early South.
Joyce Rockwood Hudson
Frankfort, Kentucky
1
Mired
T he New World. The first problem with this place, thought William as he shifted restlessly on a bench on the porch of the Packsaddle Tavern, fanning flies in the summer heat, is that it is so new a man must choose from a very short list of occupations. The second problem is that there are yet fewer opportunities for that same man to find even the basest employment through which he might save up enough money to stake himself in the occupation of his choice. Never mind that here money counts for less than credit and barter. If this were Scotland he could at least find work in the Atlantic trade or in service as a groomsman or gardener, draw his pay in coin, and live frugally enough to accumulate a stake. But here in South Carolina the tasks of common workers fall to slaves, and a free man of little means is left out in the cold. Had he known this before he set out across the ocean, would he still be in Scotland?
William leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes, letting his mind drift away across the sea. It seemed he had ever been faced with opportunity closing down. Even his birth among the rough and rowdy Highlanders of Scotland came just as they were losing out in their armed struggle with the Lowland Scots and their English overlords. At issue was whether the British throne belonged to the House of Hanover, as favored by the Lowlanders, or to the House of Stuart, as favored by the Highlanders. No MacGregor could stay out of the fight, including William s father, who was killed in this struggle, leaving his only child to be born fatherless into a crumbling world. William s mother, with the help of her kinsmen, raised her son as best she could. She even got him some schooling from well-meaning Presbyterian missionaries, to whom William was grateful, if not persuaded by their faith. But despite his mother s best efforts, the prospects for a fatherless lad in the impoverished Highlands were next to nil. And so when his dead father s sister, newly widowed and childless, invited him to move down from the Highlands to her small home in Glasgow, William jumped at the chance, and his mother waved him off tearfully with her blessing.
In Glasgow he was astonished to see so many people of all sorts working at so many different occupations. Thinking back on it now, he did, in truth, almost wish that he had stayed there. Glasgow even had a university where, for a price, one could study and learn most anything. But then, as now, William had no money. To remedy this, he went to work in a tobacco factory where fortunes were being made by men in fine cloth