In April, 2000, the Allen Canning Company of Siloam Springs, Arkansas processed its last batch of “poke sallet” greens.
John Williams, the canning supervisor at Allen, said, “The decision to stop processing poke was primarily because of the difficulty of finding people interested in picking poke and bringing it to our buying locations.”
Poke processing was never a significant item in their mult-imillion-dollar enterprise, but Williams mentioned that one of the best markets for canned poke was southern California due to the Oakies.
Euell Gibbons lauds poke as “probably the best-known and most widely-used wild vegetable in America.” In Stalking the Wild Asparagus, Gibbons writes that Native Americans eagerly sought it and early explorers were unstinting in their praise of this “succulent potherb.”
“They carried seeds when they went back home and poke soon became a popular cultivated garden vegetable in southern Europe and North Africa, a position it still maintains. In America it is still a favorite green vegetable with many country people and the tender young sprouts, gathered from wild plants, often appear in vegetable markets, especially in the South.”
In the lean years before World War II, poke salad–like ramps–was one of the first edible wild herbs to appear in the spring, lending welcome addition to a winter’s sustenance diet of dried beans, cornbread, and salt pork .
The only drawback to poke salad is that it’s poisonous. The mature parts of the plant and the roots contain significant amounts of a violent but slow-acting emetic, phytolaccatoxin. Having said that, you’re probably wondering why in the hell anyone would even consider eating it, but prepared properly, poke salad is safe and delicious.
Harvest only the youngest, tenderest sprouts of poke, no more than a foot or so. Wash, stem, and trim. Add to a pot of water, bring to a boil, drain, rinse, return to pot with water, and bring to simmer with oil, a slit hot pepper pod, and a big pinch of sugar.
Drain and use much as you would spinach. Euell has a poke salad dip in his book. I like it with scrambled eggs and onion, and it’s wonderful in an omelette or a quiche.
If you live in the South, you know a hunter, and sooner or later you’re likely to find yourself with game in your kitchen.
Deer, duck, and dove are among the most typical, but the possibilities are only limited by state legislatures, and I have it on good authority–actually a stentorian chorus therof–that Mississippi’s version of this august body politic is subject to circumvention.
Because feral hogs have become very much a nuisance in Mississippi, I’m also given to understand that hunting the beasts is encouraged; the only red tape involved is permit fees. (“Cross my palm with silver.”) Pig season stretches from October to May, but that, too, is (again, from what I understand) loosely enforced.
So be advised: given a likely glut of hog carcasses, it’s a good bet that if you show the slightest interest in wild pork to anyone with a good gun, you’re liable to end up with a haunch of wild hog even if you don’t remember saying you wanted one at that kegger in Pelahatchie.
And, yes, I have a copy of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert on DVD, and yes, I know words to several Donna Summer songs, and during my salad days, I even once had a pair of Daisy Dukes (don’t say it). But unless you wear gear to bed, I am not what you would call delicate, much less fastidious, so when my buddy Raymond, a sure shot, showed up at my door with this huge haunch of meat dripping blood in his hands, I gratefully accepted it and sent him on his way with a jar of pear preserves and his promise that he’d be back the next day after work to take some of the cooked meat home.
Back in my college days I studied medieval literature, and the accounts of their gargantuan feasts, where great gobbets of meats were served and consumed with vast goblets of wine made a great impression, so the sight of this shoulder of boar sent a vicarious thrill through my little want-a-Garter mind. I longed to have an open hearth with a blazing fire and a turnspit dog to cook the meat evenly.
Alas and alack, I had no such fire, not even a place to build one in the yard, and besides, my snooty neighbors would look askance on me roasting meat on anything less than a designer grill, which left me with my trusty little gas oven (c. 1964).
First I washed the shoulder, which thankfully had been skinned but still had a generous sprinkling of stiff, short black hairs. I knew this wild meat had to be marinated, and for a long time, so I dragged a cooler out and there I placed the leg, which I’d salted ever-so-lightly, while I made the marinade. Not being one to waste wine, I chose to use a big can of pineapple juice and apple vinegar (4:1) with about a half-dozen freshly-squeezed oranges, two tablespoons pickling spices, several branches of fresh rosemary and threw in a Zatarain’s sack out of sheer habit.
I let this simmer for a while on the stove, then poured it on the meat, added enough water to cover, closed the lid and placed the cooler in a corner. After the leg had marinated for about 12 hours, I drained it, stabbed it in the meaty parts with a short, sharp knife and stuffed sliced cloves of garlic into the cuts. I then brushed it with a light oil (NOT olive oil), and dusted it with a mixture of salt and pepper (50/50). It went into the oven about 8 a.m. on a rack at 400 for about an hour, then I reduced the heat to about 300, and there it cooked for the rest of the day.
I took it out around 4 to cool, and when Raymond came by around 5:30, we carved it up, Raymond taking most of it as well as the bones for his dog Terry, who is a friend of mine as well. The meat was quite good, not gamey at all, and just as tender as it could be.
Buried deep in my album is a photograph from the hot summer of 1979, of the boys playing music on a flatbed trailer. We appear to be laying down some pretty hot licks, going for the big $100 purse in the band contest on the Oxford square. Old John Bradley is thumping the stand-up bass; Mr. Cragin Knox frails the banjo. Randy Cross, staring off into the flaw- less summer sky, is on rhythm guitar; the immortal L. W. Thomas is playing lead; and I am sawing on the fiddle.
Our faces are solemn masks, the de rigueur expression of the old-time string band. WOOR Radio is flashing us out over the airwaves; the shirt- sleeved judges lean on their elbows; and in the foreground Mr. Jack Cofield himself is snapping our picture as if we were very big dogs indeed. It is a satisfying image, for it fails to mention that we were not big dogs at all but mere dabblers in the music trade. Moreover, it omits the dubious harmonies we sent aloft that day to the old arched windows of city hall.
And to look at it you would never guess, any more than the “bored judges” or the listeners scattered on the green, that our faces-so cool, so self-possessed-are in fact rigid with fear, and in our hearts a secret voice bargains with God to only let us live through this set and we would never, never, never play in public again.
What, then, were we doing there? It was a question we often asked our-selves when the pressure, largely self-induced, was on. It was not really all that bad, playing music-we had our good days, even a triumph now and then. But there was always the suspicion that sooner or later the People Out Front would rise up in their scorn and drive us from the stage. hey never did, of course, and we lurked on the fringes of the business for years.
We were known by picturesque names-The Waterford Road, The Eighth of January, The Horse Stealers. Friends came and went: Uncle Frank Childrey and his Gibson mandolin; Gathal Runnells, a great fiddler; young Les Kerr and Mike Burduck, a fine bass player. We played all around, turning up like rented palms at parties and banquets and wedding receptions, even at wine-and-cheese affairs where our repertoire nearly always clashed with the decor. We worked the Watermelon Festivals in Water Valley, the Faulkner Conferences in Oxford, and Ole Miss pep rallies.
And always there were the taverns: Abbey’s Irish Rose, Cajun Fred’s, The Warehouse; all gone now but lively enough places once upon a time. In the taverns we met all the usual roadhouse foolishness. People grabbed at our microphones and spilled beer on our instruments. Combatants arrived at our feet in a spray of broken glass. It was a rare show that we didn’t get 10 requests for “Rocky Top,” a song we all hated and couldn’t play very well anyway.
But in our travels, we knew also the good bright sun, the faces of friends, pretty girls dancing, free drinks, and the smell of barbecue in the air. It was a colorful pastime, and there was nothing quite like walking into a job with an instrument case and having the public mistake you for a musician.
We fooled them for a long time, though we never amounted to much more than a bunch of boys playing music on a flatbed truck. We had none of the professional apparatus, like matching shirts or our own sound equipment, and our showmanship was… elemental, you might say (“Now it’s time for the boys to innerduce themselves,” L. W. would announce, “and we would turn and nod and shake hands with each other, and sometimes the People would get it and sometimes they wouldn’t.)
Yet in time we gained, to our everlasting astonishment, a following. Not just our girlfriends and cronies, understand, but people we never knew before. To the Ole Miss students we were a novelty beyond words, to the older folks perhaps the half-remembered voice of a simpler time. And in spite of our fears none of them ever seemed to care if we were very slick or not, if we broke strings or forgot the words. All they wanted was a joyful noise, and we could give them that. Through the old songs, we touched something solid and authentic in the heart that all of them could recognize, even if they didn’t know why.
And for ourselves – when we were rolling along and hanging on to the steady thumping of the bass, we were in high cotton indeed. So in the end it was worth it, and if we had to ask what we were doing up there, we need look no further than the music for an answer. We would do it all again, I think. And when the house lights came on for the last time, and the boys closed their cases and went away into the world, they took with them a long memory, and the old songs – to be broken out in the parlor now and then, or suddenly remembered in the ruin of night. And in my album the boys are captured forever, having a bad day but trying to do their best just the same.
We won the $100, by the way-not for being top band in the contest, but for being the only one to sign up. “That’s show biz,” as the feller said.
This recipe is the only one you’ll ever need. Many might consider the dark rum optional, but it’s essential; even if you’re a teetotaler, the alcohol burns off in the cooking, and good heavens, you’re bound to know someone with at least one bottle.
I like a mix of gold and dark raisins, and prefer salted pecans to walnuts. Like all great cakes, this one is best made the day before.
Mix thoroughly ¾ cup vegetable oil and ¾ cup warm buttermilk with ¾ cup white and ¾ cup light brown sugar (you don’t have to pack it). Set aside. Sift together 2 ½ cups plain flour, 2 teaspoons baking soda, 2 teaspoons each ground cinnamon and ground ginger, and a couple dashes of nutmeg.
Add half the dry ingredients to the oil/buttermilk mixture, and the rest alternately with 4 well-beaten eggs at room temperature. Add two cups grated carrots, about ¾ cup raisins, ¾ cup chopped nuts and a cup of drained crushed pineapple. Finish off with a tablespoon of vanilla extract and a generous slug of dark rum (okay, three ounces).
Pour batter into a Bundt or two 9 in. layer pans and bake at 375 until fragrant and springy. For the frosting, mix a pound of cream cheese and ½ stick butter at room temperature with powdered sugar to texture, a teaspoon almond extract and grated orange zests. Sprinkle with nuts.
In the 1930s, Harry J. Hoenselaar worked at a honey-glazed ham store in Detroit, handing out samples and teaching drugstore clerks how to slice hams for sandwiches. He had long since mastered knifing ham from the bone, but he knew there had to be a better way.
Then Harry had a dream, and with a tire jack, a pie tin, a washing machine motor, and a knife, he fashioned and patented the world’s first ham spiralizer. He later bought the Detroit store on Eight Mile Road in Detroit where he once worked from the owner’s widow in 1957.
This, the original Honey Baked Ham store, eventually spawned a company with 417 stores, from Southern California to New Hampshire. The busiest is in a suburb of Birmingham, Ala. After decades of familial wrangling and consolidation, the entire operation has landed in the lap of Linda van Rees, a granddaughter, who moved the company headquarters to Alpharetta, Georgia, in 2015.
Many people will bake a spiral-sliced ham, but it’s best bring the ham to room temperature, twist a steak knife around the small center bone, and follow the natural lines of the meat to cut smaller pieces for the table.
Cut slits in the slice, no less than four radiating from the middle, or it’ll buckle, and you don’t want that. Don’t use much grease in the skillet, either. Blister to singing; some people like slices blackened. If you don’t serve it on white bread, you’re going straight to hell.
I should soon come home to Carolina, to the house you love, to the deep old woods I love, and to loving you, forever.
When I get back, I know you’ll ask me about Jackson, what it is like, what its people are like, how it looks, how they live, what makes the city what it is. I’m going to tell you now to clear my mind of it, leave it forever. Once home I do not want to think of it.
Jackson is a fractured collection of people in a city that has lost all sense of itself, a shattered glass best melt and recast. It’s an ugly place; there are few beautiful buildings, no streets of stately homes one expects to see in an old Southern city, just blocks upon broken blocks, mile upon miserable mile of buckling asphalt and falling buildings.
The city lacks grandeur, even faded grandeur, in any degree. Its main street is blemished by vacant shops and offices with dusty, empty, shattered windows like rotten teeth. Even its recent upgrade with roundabouts and verges doesn’t disguise the squalor.
Poverty and racial tension propel Jackson, a volatile combination that pulls back more than it pushes the social, economic, physical nature of the city. The political landscape is dominated by self-serving personalities motivated solely by a desire to stay in office in order to further their own ends. Inevitably, the lion’s share of federal funding finds its way to empower political ends.
I can see you smiling as you read this, thinking, “You fool, it’s Mississippi; what did you expect?” Well, darling, I did expect more. I told you that before I came here. I expected to find people working together, a fellowship of stewards.
Tell me that’s why you love me, because I am a dreamer, and every night here, I dreamed of you in that old house in the mountains under a million stars.
Now that I’m safely in Virginia, I’ll give you the impressions of Jackson you wanted.
I should say first that nothing prepared me for Jackson, Mississippi. I’m still not sure if it’s because that is as far South as I’ve ever been (or want to be again, to be honest) or because Jackson itself is so sullen and isolated.
The city is frozen; those capable of formulating effective fixes for the neighborhoods of row upon row of abandoned, decaying houses are either powerless or don’t care. An economic riptide is washing businesses away from a city bound and gagged by petty racial politics playing to self-interests.
Even compared to the rest of Mississippi, Jackson seems narrow-minded, divided, and backwards. The city reminds me a once-thriving outpost of an eroded empire, leaving an indifferent government, an inefficient bureaucracy, and venal churches blind to suffering and deaf to prayers.
Jackson is a nest of grasping, insular people huddled together for safety on the banks of a dirty river where nothing is safe. What should be a shining stage for vision and concord is instead a fetid wallow of greed and dissent.
When change comes to Jackson, it will not come from within, but from without.
Almost 200 [sic] years after the battle which killed 200 [sic] Americans at an old Spanish church outside San Antonio, the essential argument remains the same: were these settlers fighting for their “freedom” against the oppression of a Mexican tyrant, Antonio López de Santa Anna, or were they mostly interested in preserving the slavery recently independent Mexico opposed, but [which the settlers] considered essential [sic] for the success of their burgeoning cotton farms? Burrough, Tomlinson[,] and Stanford leave no doubt [italics mine] about the correct answer. Slavery. –The Guardian, August 30, ‘21
Praise for Forget the Alamo (2021), a celebrated revisionist history which, according to The Guardian, has laid to rest once and for all, with no room for further discussion, an argument of almost two centuries’ duration! Well, thank goodness, I say.
Nevertheless, nagging questions remain. Is the “essential argument” about the Alamo really such an antique, or is it freshly sprung from the collective conscience of the Third Millennium? Were the defenders of the Alamo really such moral paupers that they would sell their lives violently and irretrievably for nothing more than cheap plantation labor–Would you, dear reader?–or is it possible they chose to fight and die for some higher purpose? Is it conceivable that soft, comfortable, well-fed scholars whose entire lives have been spent in school–is it conceivable such persons are suddenly able to remove all doubt about the motives of men–white, black, red, or brown–who lived hard lives no contemporary person can imagine?
Forget the Alamo is a landmark document of The Woke, a populist movement of seemingly boundless authority whose acolytes seek Righteous Truth and, like Christopher Columbus, believe they have discovered a New World. However, and also like Columbus, they are mistaken, for many persons less objectionable were there long before they arrived. In any event, one quality–their first principle, in fact–renders The Woke unique: i.e., their universal condemnation of persons from the past who, through no fault of their own, were born free and white. The Woke have decided, all by themselves, that Western Civilization–from the Vikings[1] to just yesterday–is irredeemably tainted by oppression, suppression, deception, cruelty, corruption, and lies promulgated by the white race. At best, this assumption is a grave discourtesy; at worst, it slanders people whom The Woke never met, who are conveniently dead and thus no longer around to speak for themselves.
Ironically, because The Woke have little chance–and less desire–to participate in a cause that demands physical courage and sacrifice, they have raised an Alamo of their own, a bastion of morality whence double-shotted rhetoric may be fired into the national conscience. Their Alamo is unique: being virtual, no one is able to assault it! Ambrose Bierce might have anticipated The Woke Movement when he included this definition in The Devil’s Dictionary:
Discussion, n. A method of confirming others in their errors.
Theirs is an egregious fallacy. It is Presentism, a tendency by which citizens of a distant and far different time are judged in the light of contemporary morality–judged by, in G.K. Chesterton’s words, “the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”[2]
For our purpose here, let us limit Chesterton’s “small and arrogant oligarchy” to, first, The Woke themselves, and second, those whom they have “awakened[3].” To the latter, we might well apply a cliched (but hard to improve on) simile. They are like sheep who must have a shepherd to protect them from the wolf. Tragically, shepherd and wolf are often one and the same: an entity who has understood since the days of Eden that, when it comes to control, nothing works like fear and guilt. The Great Assholes of History (including, in our time, Putin and Trump) rallied their flocks with fear–of Jews, of negroes, of Communists or Capitalists, of Armenians, of Catholics or Protestants or Democrats, what have you. The Woke, however, choose to invoke the specter of guilt. The Woke speak with the iteration of the sadistic nun in Game of Thrones–“Shame! Shame! Shame!”–and white people everywhere respond, “But what are we guilty of?”
Well, there’s Texas Independence for one, and slavery, and Jim Crow, and the Confederacy–and how about old Christopher Columbus? The Italian navigator, bold and ambitious and under Spanish patronage, set out in three primitive caravels in the belief that, by sailing west, he would discover the East. His primary motive was to open the Orient’s riches to European trade; at the same time, he would illuminate blackened pagan souls with the light of Christianity. As everyone knows, Columbus did not reach the Orient–too much geography was in the way; instead, he stumbled upon something almost as good: a world new to him, filled with possibilities for exploitation and populated by heathens ripe for conversion. Columbus and those who came after took advantage of the opportunity and set about exploiting and converting with the brutality common to Renaissance life. I was not around in the Renaissance, nor do I know a single person who was. I’ve never been rich, have exploited no one, and converting the heathen has never engaged my interest. Yet for me, for you, for the white boy pumping gas at the Shell station, The Woke have a stern admonition: For this, for the cruelty and excesses of European adventurers, are you guilty. White people–how dare you continue to celebrate as heroic, as consequential, this man Columbus! Raze his monuments! Erase Columbus Day from the calendar! Teach your children the Truth: Columbus was a piece of shit[4], and you all white motherfuckers are responsible! Wake! Wake to the shame!
I decline to feel responsible for Christopher Columbus, and I hope you do as well. Meanwhile, “Who’s Columbus?” asks the white boy at the Shell station.
* * * * *
Though secular in intention, The Woke manifesto gives off a strong whiff of Calvinism. The concept of Original Sin–“In Adam’s fall, we sinned all”–is revised and updated so that contemporary white people must answer not only for the disobedience of Adam and Eve[5], but for the collective misdeeds of their ancestors. No other ethnic group has been thus burdened, nor has any such burden been so joyfully embraced. As it turns out, The Awakened are happy to dismantle their own culture, ignoring its virtues while simultaneously ignoring the vices of all the others. The physical vandalism and destruction of monuments is an expression of a spiritual zeal not only self-indulgent, but perfectly safe. In marked contrast to those whom they condemn, The Woke make no sacrifice, face no peril, suffer no hardship. Like Medieval flagellants (but absent the pain and gore), The Woke and The Awakened revel in guilt, robe themselves in the sins of others, and spew curses on their fellows–the white ones, anyhow. The result, for them, is a warm sense of moral superiority and, even better, the happy knowledge that a culture’s entire narrative is crumbling under their hands. They do not care to create, nor do they build; they only destroy. This is their sole accomplishment and will be their only legacy.
I have said The Woke frame their judgments from Presentism, a fallacy that is itself framed from ignorance–which, I hasten to add, is not to be equated with stupidity. The latter is a mental vacuum common among those who, for whatever reason, cannot or do not wish to think, who view the world without complexity as it presents itself in the moment. Ignorance, on the other hand, is a conscious choice by persons who refuse not to be stupid. The Woke demonstrate ignorance in two ways. First, they seem to have no understanding of the ambiguities of history; second, they apparently know very little about its realities. Taken together, these deficiencies should disqualify The Woke from judgment. Instead, they form the cornerstone of the movement.
* * * * *
The principle of ambiguity, as I use it here, is hardly complex–anyone not a psychopath should find it already familiar. It begins with an unassailable premise: everybody you know, including yourself, is totally fucked up[6]. That goes for your mother, your grandma, your best pal, the lover whom you believe hung the moon and the stars–everybody. This hard truth, once accepted–and accept it we must, soon or late–proves useful as we ponder why the world itself is so . . . well, you know.
A useful truth no doubt, but one that harbors a dangerous possibility. Should we allow it sole governance in our conduct toward others, no human relationship could endure. Indeed, it is unlikely we could endure even ourselves. Lucky for us, this first premise is only half an equation, made complete by a second equally unassailable: we have the innate, perhaps evolutionary, ability to acknowledge universal human frailty and at the same time continue to love and admire, or at least like, or at least tolerate others–and ourselves–in spite of it. Not everyone, of course, gets a free pass. Only a fool would ignore evil or dismiss injustice or excuse one whose only guide is a malignant nature. Every person is weighed in the balances, and some, in the end, deserve neither forgiveness nor mercy. In my view, however, the Total Depravity of Man, perhaps the most significant Calvinist doctrine, is, like Original Sin from which it derives, a wholly artificial concept contrary to reason, contrary to evidence, and offensive to every decent impulse of the human heart. To believe without exception that a man’s worth cannot transcend his inevitable folly is nothing less than nihilism and denies the value and purpose of existence itself.
Nevertheless, it is through the lens of Total Depravity that The Woke view history. They are merciless in their appraisal of historic figures great and small. Should a man[7] be brought to judgment before them, his conduct in life, however honorable, is dismissed as irrelevant. In the court of The Woke, higher virtues are inadmissible evidence, and nobody gets a free pass.
Unless, of course, he is a man like George Floyd.
The Woke represent Floyd’s brutal, needless murder by Minneapolis police as emblematic of the abuse of power and authority; in this, at least, they are correct.. Floyd was a felon, a dope-head, and a thief–a troubled soul struggling to overcome his demons. He needed help, but what he got was death at the hands of an officer sworn to serve and protect everybody. However, extensive media coverage elevated Floyd above the myriads who have suffered a similar fate and made of him a symbol which The Woke were quick to seize upon for their own purposes. Now they are able to demand, and demand we accept, that men who acted in the past be replaced in our admiration by persons who are acted upon. And while the Woke ignore the egregious flaws and ambiguities surrounding a man like Floyd, they refuse to tolerate the same qualities in those they put on trial and condemn to oblivion. Like Columbus. Like General Lee and Walt Whitman. Like the defenders of the Alamo.
Hard evidence has revealed William Travis to be a cad of the first order. James Bowie, a cold killer, has always been difficult to romanticize: the knife he designed was not meant for whittling, but to cleave an opponent from stem to rudder-post. David Crockett was neither cad nor killer, but a genuine legend in his own time; his principle flaws seem to have been political ambition and his role in the “heroic Anglo narrative.” These three, and the 180-odd men who died with them, were not mythic heroes, nor were they models of Christian virtue–this, no one can deny. Still, they were possessed of humanity: like all men, like George Floyd, their souls were of light and darkness, fraught with ambiguity.
Here, however, the similarity ends. The Alamo’s defenders were nothing like us; in fact, I would argue they have no parallel in modern culture. Like the principle of ambiguity, this is an element of history The Woke cannot seem to grasp as they hold men to account and judge them by a moral standard that did not even exist in their time.
* * * * *
I alluded above to “citizens of a distant and far different time.” Here we will take a glance at how distant and how different their time actually was.
Persons living in the present are privileged to view the past as an unfolding series of complex and interrelated events. Patterns emerge that are obvious to us, but were invisible to those who took part in making them, just as we are unaware of the shape our own time will take in the view of those who come after us. And while we can gather data and facts and discern cultural shifts–while we can analyze and interpret events in a larger context–there is one thing we cannot do: we cannot now, nor will we ever, be able to enter or even begin to understand the minds of those who acted out their parts in a vanished time. A fundamental rule of science states that a thing observed is necessarily changed by the very act of observing. It is impossible, no matter how hostile or sympathetic we may be, to look upon persons of the past without interference from our own consciousness.
The defenders of the Alamo can only be viewed in the context of the 1830s, and thus are no more comprehensible to us than inhabitants of Pluto. It is easy to condemn their morality until we reflect that it was the product of their world, not this one. The same is true for any period in history, including that within living memory.
Medical science began to emerge from the Medieval around the time of the Great War. In all the long ages prior, a person who lived into adulthood was possessed of a constitution strong enough to survive; such a person, of whatever color, was an exception. In a moment, we will touch on some of the difficulties his survival brought down upon him, but here let us try an illustrative experiment. Choose a night in deep winter when the rain has turned to sleet, and the ground is covered in ice. After the temperature falls below freezing, take off your shoes and socks. No coat or thermal underwear allowed: only pants, a shirt, a hat, and a single blanket over your shoulders. Now walk out into your yard and see what happens.
If you can stand the pain more than five minutes, you are a better man than I. Ten minutes, and you are a masochist. Once back in your warm house, ponder this: it is impossible–impossible–for a barefoot (or rag-shod) human being, clad only in a thin coat and trousers and hat, to survive for weeks in temperatures below freezing. Yet, time and again throughout history, we find persons doing precisely the impossible!
As a specific example, consider the Confederate Army of Tennessee during their siege of Nashville in December, 1864. Many of the men were without shoes. Food was scarce. Firewood was scarce. They had few tents and few blankets; if a man had an overcoat, it was likely taken from a Federal corpse back in Franklin. Every morning, men would be found frozen to death. We can understand that. We are astonished the whole rebel army did not freeze to death!
How did they endure under those circumstances? The customary answer, “Well, they were tougher than we are,” is insufficient. It is too easy, glosses over too much, and fails to take into account the realities of human limitation and the demonstrable nature of Impossibility. What answer, then, can we offer in its place? Devotion to cause and country, however fervent, cannot overcome physical impossibility. Neither can the will to live, nor hatred of an enemy, nor love for one’s comrades, nor the memory of folks at home. We may salute the indomitability of the Spirit, but in the end, we must face an incontrovertible fact: the human body, unprotected against extreme cold, ceases to function. The heart stops. Death comes. There is simply no alternative.
Except . . . there was an alternative. Soldiers of the Army of Tennessee first endured the impossible, then gave a good account of themselves in the battle of Nashville. In headlong retreat–physically and emotionally exhausted, terrified, freezing, starving, debilitated–the majority not only continued to endure the impossible, but in many cases did so on their own initiative, without the support of comrades or the presence of any military discipline. They walked all the way to Mississippi, and when they stopped, they were still an army and still dangerous–individually dangerous and ready to fight again.
(In one personal account, published in Confederate Veteran magazine in the 1880s, the author tells of his experiences on the retreat from Nashville. These included wading the Harpeth River up to his armpits and emerging soaking wet on the far bank–and this at night under the same conditions as our experiment. His comment? “I walked fast to keep from freezing.”)
How did they do it? The answer is unlikely to be found, for it lies in a realm of human nature forever beyond our reach. So, too, is the answer to a parallel question: Why did they do it? To ensure the spread of slavery into the territories? To confirm white superiority? To keep the niggers in their place? These are among the responses The Woke might offer as they drive their kids to soccer practice.
When the noise, the frenzy, the fever of postmodern life grows unbearable, The Woke also drive their kids, and themselves, to therapy. When the darkness comes down, and that old anvil settles on the heart, a variety of nostrums–Paxil, Zoloft, Cymbalta–are on hand to ease the pain. Who is not thankful? The Woke are thankful, surely, but they forget that those whom they condemn had no recourse from a woeful mind, a troubled soul.
I have always believed that, for most of human history, people hovered on the brink of madness–and why not? Little in their world was soft–persons white and black and brown, rich and poor, were alike cold in winter, hot in summer, tormented by insects, in constant pain from headaches, toothaches, arthritis, pleurisy, melancholia, and for these no help but willow twigs and whiskey. They were surrounded by death in violent encounters and in their quotidian lives. The prick of a thorn might easily lead to blood poisoning; a woman had little chance of surviving childbirth, and the infant would likely die before it could walk. The specter of sickness–yellow fever, scarlet fever, cholera, consumption–lurked always in their minds, and suicide was a common escape for people who could no longer bear the sorrow or the fear[8]. Nighttime was a stygian dark, an abyss of silence that tortured the imagination. By light of day, they broke their backs at labor and grew old before they ought. They lived at the mercy of horses, mules, milk cows, the weather, wood stoves, fires, spoiled food–and on the frontier, what they ate, they had to grow or kill for themselves. Their food, heavily salted and overcooked, was empty of vitamins and short on calories, and there was rarely enough of it. On the frontier, people were closer to the natural world, more in tune with its rhythms and moods, than anyone alive today, and they were not immune to its beauty. Yet, for them, the natural world was no Garden of Eden; it was hostile and threatening, and in every way their adversary.
We, who dwell in such ease and comfort, must allow those people their own lives and condemn, as outlined above, only those who deserve it.
Thus we return to the men in the Alamo. What they knew and how they perceived the world is unavailable to us. How they actually viewed slavery and nation-building and Negroes and Mexicans and Indians is forever beyond our grasp. We can only examine the facts, among which is this: the defenders of the Alamo fought with the certain knowledge that their lives would be the price for something they believed in. We cannot know how they saw their sacrifice: that belongs to them alone. They were deeply flawed, but for me–and I hope for you–they remain brave and honorable. They gave us Texas, and men like them gave us America for better or for worse.
* * * * *
I have said–and I believe it true–that The Woke have no interest in discussion. I will add here that The Woke are not only dismissive of, but immune to, criticism. They are at the helm, and whatever voices might be raised in opposition–including my own–will go unheard by them. How and why that happened is beyond the scope of this brief exercise. Instead, and despite the futility, I will conclude with a few paragraphs entitled simply,
A Message for the Woke.
The cruelties and inequities of the human experience are nothing new to historians who, since at least the 1960s, have struggled to temper romance with reality[9]. Nevertheless, you believe–or behave as if you do–that you are the very first to be woke (awakened?) to the realization that some people got left out of the American story. Your attitude might have been forgiven–are we not supposed to challenge the status quo?–had you striven honorably to recognize voices heretofore silenced and to illuminate inequalities (the list is long) heretofore ignored. Such an approach might have healed old wounds and made possible a genuine reconciliation among antagonists.
Instead, you have embarked on a path that leads only to greater antagonism and separation. On behalf of minorities you cannot possibly understand, you have chosen to erase the memory of people you cannot possibly understand, who lived in a time you cannot possibly understand–all this to spite others whose view you do not wish to understand. You have shattered the old Metanarrative into a swarming pool of micronarratives that may themselves be divided into fragments, each one jealous of the rest, each one insisting on its true place as the one and only axle of the universe–and this in the name of Equitas.
Your belligerent righteousness has won the day. Soon, no one may point to an ancestor with pride, nor to any place where his kinsmen acted bravely and well. You will teach your children to be ashamed of whence they came, and pretty soon they’ll stop caring, for you will teach them that as well. The old stories will be banished and in time forgotten, and you will have no stories of your own, for, in the world you are creating, it is unlikely you will ever do anything worth telling about. Then one day, after all the monuments are pulled down, all the buildings and towns and landmarks renamed, all the long narrative of humanity purged–on that day you will look down from your moral Gibraltar and discover that you yourselves are forgotten. Or, if your movement is remembered at all, it will be as a pale, pathetic, humorless blur whose cowardice was masked as virtue, whose pandering was disguised as sympathy. You have rung the Passing Bell for others; you do not see that it tolls for thee as well.
This Message for the Woke is delivered from the ramparts of the Alamo, the Rebel trenches at Petersburg, the field of Union dead on Marye’s Heights. I speak for Jeff Davis at Monterey and Pat Cleburne musing in St. John’s churchyard; for all the unknown dead who gave up their lives for causes they believed in–and for my pals Neumeyer and Rudisill, killed in Vietnam, and for my Old Man Charlie Bahr and my daddy Gene Hereford and my Uncle Bill Gleaton who helped whip the Axis in World War II, and for my Great Grandaddy Josiah Hereford who fought in every battle of the Army of Northern Virginia, and finally from my own once-upon-a-time self, crouched on the stern sheet of a landing craft in the Tonkin Gulf. For these and for myself I speak, and for the myriads who had the great good fortune to live out their lives before you came along.
–Howard Bahr The Mean Summer of ‘22
NOTES:
[1] Actually, I have yet to see enlightened comment on the Vikings–but they were mostly white, Nordic even, so their time is coming. [2] For the nature of Presentism, I am indebted to an old friend, the historian Michael Bradley. Another old friend, Frank Walker, introduced me to Chesterton long years ago. [3] By this means, we excuse the reasonably intellectual and the myriads with more to worry about than the historical canon. [4] This phrase is not original to me–a Woke Female of my acquaintance once used it in a media posting. Columbus as a piece of shit? A marvel of reductivism to stun the intellect! [5] Presumably white themselves if illustrated Bibles are to be trusted. And The Almighty too, and Jesus and Mary and Joseph–the whole crowd save poor old Gaspar the Moor, who was no doubt oppressed and forbidden to vote. [6] I challenge the reader to assemble, from all the resources of the language, a more succinct phrase to identify this fundamental human quality. [7] I am aware of no woman of any class or color who has fallen under the disapprobation of The Woke–a curious omission in a movement–indeed, a generation–hyper-sensitive to gender equality. [8] We are often told that God gives us no burden greater than we can bear, but, Believer, consider this: Your husband left weeks ago, and you can no longer hope he will return. Snow sifts through the chinks in the cabin, and the weight of it will collapse the roof pretty soon. You can’t remember how long it’s been since your child died; she is turning black, her eyes are glazed, and she is beginning to smell, but still you clasp her to your breast–you simply cannot let her go. The wood-box and pantry are long since empty. Every night, more and more wolves come to snuffle and scratch at the door, and it’s only a matter of time before the Kiowa or Comanche find you. Now, in a felt-lined case lies your husband’s Dragoon pistol. You take it out, see that it is loaded and primed as he taught you. What do you say to God now? Do you pray for His help, His intervention, His protection? Do you pray for a miracle? No. As you cock the pistol–it’s hard, for the spring is strong–and press its cold muzzle to your temple, you pray only that it will work. This was a reality of life, once upon a time. [9] An instructive example is Evan S. Connell’s Son of the Morning Star (1984). While his titular subject is George Armstrong Custer, and the central event the Little Bighorn fight, Connell presents both in the wider context of the Nineteenth Century. I think no better demonstration of historical ambiguity can be found in the language.
Mississippi politician Dennis Murphree became governor of Mississippi twice on the death of the state’s chief executive while he held the lieutenant governancy, and was governor during the Great Flood of 1927. Murphree was also a newspaperman, editor of The Monitor-Herald, the weekly in his native county of Calhoun, and took a deep interest in its people and their histories.
I reproduce here Murphree’s account of the story of Dock Bishop, a north Mississippi outlaw whose reputation has passed into the romance of legend. In the summer of 2002, deputy marshals from Fort Worth made a 12-hour journey from Texas and replaced the brick inscribed “WISE” in the Sarepta cemetery with a proper tombstone for their fellow officer. The ceremony was well-attended by the good people of Calhoun County.
The Hanging of Dock Bishop by Dennis Murphree
The Monitor-Herald, Calhoun City, Calhoun Co., MS, Thursday, April 9, 1942
A few days ago the newspapers of the nation carried the thrilling story of how the FBI or “G” men had surrounded the Number One Bad Man of the United States, Charles Chapman, over in Neshoba County, Mississippi, and called on him to surrender. When he refused the demand and opened fire these representatives of the law promptly sent him to his death with eighteen bullet holes in his body. For years, it is said, Chapman had slipped in and out of this, his home community, being shielded from the law by friends and kinsfolks, while members of the FBI kept relentlessly on his trail until they finally cornered him and sent him to his death.
Pondering this grim story and talking with friends who had first-hand and personal information about its stark details, there came from time to time back to my mind the story of Calhoun County’s All-time Bad Man, and his gruesome end. This is a story which was fresh in the minds of all Calhoun County folks in my earliest boyhood days, and the details were so thoroughly implanted in my fresh young mind in those days that I have never forgotten. One day this week, I was gratified indeed to have a personal visit from my lifetime friend, Uncle Bill Yancy, 87 year old citizen of Sarpeta, and talking over these things with him and having him refresh my mind on various points, I decided I would endeavor to write this story for Calhoun County folks, all of whom have heard of it, and many of whom perhaps will find it of interest.
Nearly sixty years ago, up in the high hills of Northeast Calhoun County and along the line of Lafayette, there lived the characters of this story among a people who were honest, sincere, hardworking, mostly god fearing, and all in all the kind and type of folks who are even yet the very backbone and sinew of good citizenship of our land today. The blight of the four years of Civil War still lay heavy on the land. Times were hard, money was scarce, opportunity was lacking and yet these people made the best of what they had, and enjoyed life as best they might. There was a dance one night in the home of a good citizen who lived Northeast of Sarepta, with a fiddle and a banjo, and a man to “beat the straws,” in a big old log house, with a huge fire place, in which blazed a big fire of hickory logs and fat pine knots. It was the old-fashioned square dance. “All hands up and circle left,” “right hands across and left hands back,” ladies do see and gents you know,” “swing your partner and promenade.”
Ab Kelly was quite a character. Big and strong, a fine fellow when sober, but given to being quarrelsome and overbearing when under the influence of the brand of “wildcat” liquor, which was at that time a rather plentiful product on Cowpen and Potlockany. Ab was at the dance, more or less looking for trouble. Dock Bishop was there too. He was a man of striking appearance. More than six feet tall, coal black hair and eyes, handsome face, fine personality, Dock with his impressive personality, made many friends easily. Always he was a favorite with members of the fair sex.
On this night, Dock was having a fine time, dancing with one of the most beautiful girls present. Round and round he went, keeping perfect time, his polished boots seeming to tap most lightly as he lifted his beautiful partner to the strains of “Soldier’s Joy” and the “Eighth of January.” Somehow the sight of Dock Bishop having such a good time jarred on Ab Kelly’s vision. Somehow, Ab resented it. So, when Dock swung by with his partner on his arm, Kelly deliberately spat a brown stream of tobacco juice on Dock Bishop’s polished boot. Dock looked Kelly in the eye, half stopped, but decided to let the insult pass. Round he came again, and this time Kelly spat a big shot of tobacco juice on Bishop’s new jean trousers.
This was entirely too much. An invitation to go outside, a wild melee in which others joined, and in a few moments, Kelly was flat on the ground with a pistol bullet through his shoulder, and there was the beginning of a feud which smoldered as messages passed back and forth between the principals and with friends on both sides being slowly drawn into the affair. Months passed and finally in the little town of Dallas, two miles north of the Calhoun-Lafayette County line, the long smoldering feud burst into full blaze when principals and friends on both sides met and engaged in a general battle and shooting scrape, in which it is said that Dock Bishop, always a crack shot with a pistol, shot and killed two men whose name was Harmon and shot through the mouth another man who was present. This was too much, and immediately the officers of the law began a manhunt for Dock Bishop, and for two or three other men who were his kinsmen and friends charged as accessories to the crimes.
But Dock Bishop, like Charles Chapman, had many friends, many kinspeople scattered throughout the area from Yoccona to Scoona Rivers. It was not easy to catch him. Over a period of several months, he roamed the territory accompanied by his friends, staying a night with one kinsman, a week with another, moving as the word was brought to him of efforts being made to apprehend him. I do not remember whether or not a reward was offered for their capture. Evidently there must have been.
Anyway, down in the Robbs neighborhood in Pontotoc County and the Paris neighborhood in Calhoun County, each bordering the Calhoun-Pontotoc line, there appeared a man named Wise, from Texas, who claimed to be a cow buyer or cattle man and who made it his business to try to locate Dock Bishop and his associates. In reality, Wise was a famous detective, and he felt that he was outwitting these bad men thoroughly. But he was badly wrong, and he paid for his error with his life. Wise made friends with a member of the Bishop crowd, and agreed to reward this man if the man would direct him to Bishop’s hideout. All plans were made, and it was agreed that on a certain night, the accomplice would go on ahead of Wise and from time to time drop pieces of torn newspaper in the road so that Wise might follow and take the outlaws in their nest.
Jim Bishop was the man who promised to lead Wise to the outlaw den. It was the theory of the state in the prosecution of Dock Bishop that Jim Bishop was a tool and accomplice of Dock Bishop and that instead of leading Wise to the place where he might arrest Dock Bishop and the others, he betrayed Wise and led him to his death. Whatever is the truth about this, there can be no doubt but that Wise on a starlight night followed what he thought was a certain trail to catch the outlaws.
As a boy I saw the place where Wise was murdered. A narrow country road winding along the ridges and slopes of the red hills some five miles southeast of Sarepta in Calhoun county, and only a little way from the Pontotoc County line, came at one point between two huge white oaks trees, neither tree being more than ten feet from the road bed. It was down this road came Detective Wise on that starlight night way back in 1884, looking from time to time for the piece of newspaper scattered along the road. Neighbors who lived in hearing distance swore on the witness stand that suddenly there rang out on the still night air several gunshots and then there was silence again. The story is that when Wise walked down the road and just as he reached the two huge trees a signal was sounded and from shotguns and pistols a stream of bullets and buckshot poured into his body killing him instantly. Wise was missing several days before the countryside was aroused. But aroused it became when the story of the shots and his disappearance became known.
Posses were formed and a widespread search of the countryside was made. Combing the woods and the entire country, one member of this searching party, riding horseback through the woods, noticed as his horse stepped across a fallen log, a piece of bright red clay lying there. A clod of red clay lying by itself there in the deep woods aroused his suspicions. He got down off his horse and tied him to a nearby bush. Then he went and got down on his knees and began to remove the leaves, pine straw and other debris which covered the spot. It was a matter of a moment to determine that the earth had been disturbed there and recently. He notified other members of the posse and soon with shovels they began to remove the earth. Buried almost under the huge fallen log in a shallow grave not more than two feet deep, they found the bullet torn and mangled body of Detective Wise, and as you can very well imagine, excitement flared to a crescendo. Word went by telegraph back to Texas and within a short period there appeared on the scene grim and determined relatives of the dead man bent on seeing to it that the murderers of Detective Wise should be speedily brought to justice.
The shocking crime was too much for even the friends of Bishop and his associates. No more could they find shelter and safety in the home of people in that country. No more could they roam scot free. Public indignation mounted to such extent that realizing they could no longer escape, Bishop and one or two others went to Oxford and surrendered themselves all the while bitterly denying the murder of Wise. Money was not lacking to defend Dock Bishop and so there was employed as his legal counsel, the Hon. Hamp Sullivan of Oxford, one of the greatest criminal lawyers of his day and age.
Representing the State of Mississippi as District Attorney was the Hon. Ira D. Ogglesby, reputedly one of the ugliest men in personal appearance ever known in that country, but at the same time, one of the brightest and shrewdest prosecuting attorneys that section has known. From the very outstart, it was a battle of giants. Sullivan, with all his vast legal knowledge and great ability, took advantage of every legal technicality, every loophole, every possible avenue to save and acquit his clients. Ogglesby on the other hand backed by the majority of the law as well as public opinion, met his adversary on every point and maneuver.
Bishop was tried first. He was the chief object of the state’s attack. He was the acknowledged leader of the gang. Back and forth the battled raged, with each prospective juror being scrutinized and put under the legal microscope. Many were challenged and set aside. Those finally chosen were seated only after a barrage of questions seeking in every way and manner to determine their leanings or opinions. For days on end Ogglesby put on the stand an array of witnesses linking one to the other certain facts which all together would irrevocably damn and convict the accused Dock Bishop. Then for days, Sullivan threw forward an array of men and women whose testimony he hoped would raise a doubt as to Dock Bishop’s guilt. In the end, after many hours of deliberation, the jury filed back into a tense and crowded courtroom with a unanimous verdict of “guilty as charged.”
Standing cool, calm, and unruffled in the court’s presence, Dock Bishop declined to make any statement as to why the sentence should not be pronounced and heard the Judge sentence him to be “hanged by the neck until your are dead, dead, dead, and may the Lord have mercy on your soul.” Then followed many months of waiting while Mr. Sullivan appealed to the Supreme Court and finally that high court said: “The case against Dock Bishop is affirmed,” and set the date on which he should die. Friday, the fourth day of July, 1886, was the awful day on which Dock Bishop was slated to pay with his life for his crime.
Bright, hot sunshine fell upon the untold thousands of men, women, and children, who on horseback, on foot, in mule and ox wagons and all other kinds of transportation then in existence, wended their way toward Pittsboro, the county seat of Calhoun “to see Dock Bishop hung.” The Board of Supervisors had made arrangements to have the hanging in public. They had selected a valley two miles west of Pittsboro on the old Pittsboro and Big Creek road as the site. It was a natural amphitheater, at the head of a little hollow where on three sides the earth sloped down to the little valley and under the fine trees that covered these hillsides, thousands upon thousands of people from all over Calhoun, Pontotoc, Lafayette, and Yalobusha Counties gathered in restrained silence, waiting, watching for the dread event. A gallows of huge square timbers had been built there, and from the cross beam several feet above the hinged trap door there hung a brand new grass rope, already coiled ready for the fatal knot.
As the appointed hour drew nigh, there was a buzz from the crowd, and coming slowly down the winding country road, there was a wagon with spring seats on which sat the sheriff and his deputies, one on each side of the prisoner. In the back of the wagon, partly covered by a quilt, was the black draped coffin inside of which the body of the prisoner was soon to rest. Scott Hardin, a good man and true, was sheriff of Calhoun County. He led the way up the steps of the scaffold and the prisoner followed.
Dock Bishop stood on the gallows and looked over the great crowd assembled. There was the stillness of death over all. Pale from his long days in jail, Bishop was yet a fine looking man in the very prime of his life. A minister prayed for the forgiveness of all sins, and especially for the soul of the condemned man. Then Dock Bishop was offered the opportunity to speak for the last time on earth, and stepped forward. There was not a tremor in his voice. There was no hint of a breakdown. Calmly and with deliberation, Dock Bishop expressed his thanks to those who had befriended him; he told of how he held no malice against him nor against those officers of the law at whose hands he must suffer his life. With almost his last breath, he finished his statement by declaring that he was innocent of the death of Wise, at the same time admitting that he had killed a man in Alabama.
Not a muscle in his fine body quivered as Dock Bishop stepped on the fatal trap. The black cap was swiftly slipped over his face, and then the peculiarly tied hangman’s knot was adjusted so that it would break his neck when he fell. There was a long drawn sigh from the assembled thousands, and then Sheriff Hardin swiftly raised his hatchet and struck the rope which was so tightly stretched across the block, but not striking with the full blade, severing all strands in two save one, and the Sheriff found it necessary to make the second stroke. The trap door fell with a bang and Dock Bishop’s body shot through the hole, jerked tight on the end of the rope several feet below. There was the sound of a sharp crack as the bones of neck snapped, and swinging slowly in the ghastly circle, Dock Bishop’s body “hung by the neck until he was dead, dead, DEAD.”
When his body was finally cut down, and placed in the coffin, there stepped up to the sheriff a comely woman, who made request that she be given the rope which had taken Bishop’s life. “I was the wife of Detective W.A. Wise,” she said, and these men are my brothers.” She was given the rope, and took it back to her home in Texas.
I was born on January 6, 1886. Dock Bishop was hung on July 4, of that same year. (NOTE: July 4, 1886 was a Sunday, which casts doubts upon this being the actual date of the hanging.) I was, therefore, only six months old, and the things I tell you are, of course, only those that were told to me when I was a little boy. But I have never forgotten them, and there are many, many people yet living in Calhoun County today who will remember as I have this terrible tragedy and its shocking sequel. Jim Bishop was finally found not guilty. Bob Lamar, another one of those implicated, was kept in jail for months and years and finally the case against him was nolle prossed. W.A. Wise’s body lies today in the old cemetery at Sarepta far from those who loved him, while Bishop was buried I know not were.
And so ends the story of the man who in his day was Calhoun County’s “Charles Chapman” while “time marches on.”
Dock Bishop (b. 27 Oct. 1857, Marion County, Alabama) was buried in the Collums Cemetery, which is some 8 mi. northeast of Bruce, Mississippi.
Tom Freeland, an Oxford attorney and historian, added this postscript to the original post in August, 1914:
The article is correct about outlawry in that area. Not quite 20 years later, two federal marshals went to a house east of Yocona and north of Dallas (but nearby– outskirts of what is now Tula) to arrest a counterfeiter/parole violater. He talked them in to staying for the dinner just put on the table, and the arrestee and another shot the marshals through a window (at the trial, the coroner testified that marshalls had cornbread in their throats at death. In Greek mythology, those who killed dinner guests had gruesome eternities). They were later brought back to town, and James Stone (Phil Stone’s father) and his law partner as special prosecutors held an inquest by torchlight, largely to try to make clear to the crowd justice would be done. Later, both murderers were sentenced to hang, after a trial in which W.V. Sullivan (who had been a senator in the interim, and who was NOT a favorite of the Stones) defended the ringleader. When he was sentenced, he asked to be hung seperately than his cofelon, who was black. The judge pronounced sentence, stating that it “is not a social occasion,” that they were to be hung together. They were.
The ringleader wrote a confession which was published and sold at the hanging (I have a copy), there are pictures of them being taken from the jail in a wagon on the Square. Dept of odd coincidences; There’s an account of the day of the hanging in Blotner’s bio of Faulkner, because that was also the day 6-year old Billy Falkner moved to Oxford with his family. A few years later, James Stone bought Sullivan’s law office, where I am seated at this moment. A few years ago, an elderly client, since deceased (who gave me an original of the confession from which I got my copy) told me that she was related to the murderer, and that a cousin out in the county still has a trunk with mementos of the incident, including the window curtains with bullet holes in them. She would not tell me who it was because the family is still VERY private about this lore.
Further aside: There are not too many instances of double murders of US Marshalls in the history of the marshall service. This one is still remembered in their histories.
This is the entry on Wise from the “Officer Down Memorial Page,” (www.odmp.org) The a non-profit organization dedicated to honoring America’s fallen law enforcement officers..
Marshal Wise was shot and killed in Oxford, Mississippi, while working undercover in an attempt to apprehend two men who were wanted for murder in Texas. Marshal Wise had first gone to Oxford to return a prisoner to the local sheriff. While in town the Sheriff requested Marshal Wise’s assistance to capture the two men. Marshal Wise returned to Fort Worth where he was given permission by the City Marshal to return to Oxford to help with the investigation.
Upon his return to Mississippi, Marshal Wise disguised himself as a cattle buyer and made contact with a man close to the suspects. The man agreed to help Marshal Wise in exchange for part of the reward money. Marshal Wise devised a plan to drug the suspects with tainted whiskey and then take them into custody. The informant, however, betrayed Marshal Wise and informed the suspects of the plan. As Marshal Wise approached the home the suspects ambushed him on the roadway, shooting him with a shotgun and pistol.
The suspects buried his body on the side of the road where it was located the next day by a search team. Three suspects were eventually apprehended and sentenced to death. Two of the sentences were overturned but the third man was hung in Pittsboro, Mississippi, on July 3, 1886.
Marshal Wise had been with the agency for 18 months and was survived by his wife. He is buried in Sarepta Cemetery in Sarepta, Mississippi.
The following letter comes from a descendant of the Bishop family in the tri-corner area of Calhoun-Lafayette-Pontotoc in Mississippi. It was written by Dock Bishop, who was convicted for the killing of a federal marshal and hanged on July 4, 1886. The circumstances of the crime and the atmosphere of the time and place were such that Bishop passed from outlawry into legend, and his story became a fireside tale in the area for generations. The narrative is uneven and at times unintelligible, but those are likely for the most part due to my errors as a transcriber, and a sentence may be missing, since this is a poor copy of the original.
A few things to note are, first, the date, which Bishop gives as Oct. the __ 1850, cannot be correct, since Bishop murdered Detective Wise October 2, 1884. Why Bishop gave this date is unaccountable, but duress likely played a factor. The handwriting is in Spencerian script, a Copperplate-based style, widely used from approximately 1850 to 1925, the American de facto standard writing style for most correspondence prior to the typewriter. The use of this script, along with somewhat good—if uneven—spelling indicates some degree of education. The use of “verrie” for “very” is likely due to a familiarity with older versions of the King James Bible, composed when that variant was still in use. The letter does not mention his two co-defendants in the crime(s), Jim Bishop and Bob Lamar, but a certain G.D. comes in for condemnation, and the wording hints that Dock is trying to put the finger on him.
Finally, it seems to be that Dock signs the letter “Jeff Bishop,” and it seems reasonable to assume that Jeff/Jefferson may well have been Bishop’s actual given name.
Oxford, Miss Oct. the ___ 1850
Mr. Bill Bishop
My dear cousin, with pleasure I write you this leaves me well and hope this will find you and all the counsel. The same I wrote has as soon as I got back from Pittsboro tho have not heard from him, yet I will not have my trial the 26 of this month for the judge has called in his court and now I will have to say here until March. I think that my case will be misprocessed here and then they will send me to Coffeeville. I fear though I hope that I can stay here where I can be with my friends. I have not seen my counsel in time time cousin I am so troubled now I have a letter from my sister and ma is dead and it is verrie grievous to me to hear
I get my trial and want you to find out all you can for me so I still have no trouble when the time comes for my trial I want you all to write me for I am glad to hear from you all tell Jim that I want him to come to me soon would be glad to read a letter from him and learn all the news. I have been expecting some of you up for some time. I want you to bring me a bushel of potatoes when you come. I hear from my wife each week she is well and in good heart about my cast and has no fears but what I will come home when I have my trial she has some good evidence for me since court. Cousin, I want you to not forget to go to see
I will take it as a favor if you all will do this much for you and you shall never lose anything by it in the future. Give my love to Cousin Mallie and kiss the little ones for me. Tell them I will send them my picture when I go out to court so I can get one taken for them. Tell my little cousin that I got those peaches she sent me while I was at Pittsboro. Would be glad if you could bring them all with you at court here to see me. Tell Hal I don’t think that he has treated me right by not evidencing my card. Cousin, I have a heap to tell you when I have a chance. Tell Henry to not think hard of me for not writing him for I have so much writing to do. I want you all to come around to see me when you can at
Pittsboro this month that I think that I can demand a trial at any time and they are bound to give it to me if my liberties is debared on account of that case being against me there I want you to do all you can here on this case for I think that Jim will be present in his trial in this court and get up all you can in regards to evidence. Let me hear from you as soon as you get this with the news in the community. I hear that G.D. ed was gone and I think he is ashamed of himself and can not stand to face everybody that ever knew him after surviving such lies as he did. He is 8 miles (about) Pontotoc near Cedar Grove. I am your true cousin with love to all the connections.
Jeff Bishop
And, finally, we have “The Ballad of Dock Bishop,” written by Dottie Moore of Pontotoc County, which is justly more about Texas lawman William Wise than Doc Bishop. What a Ft. Worth detective was doing in Calhoun County then is complicated—and ambiguous—even when detailed in Selcer and Foster’s Written in Blood: The History of Fort Worth’s Fallen Lawmen, Volume 1, 1861-1909, but his murder initiated a reinstatement of justice in an area scoured by war. Bishop was hanged on July 3, 1886, “the first white man legally hanged in the state of Mississippi since the Civil War”. Selcer says that this ballad is a “variation on the more famous ‘Ballad of Sam Bass’ and ‘Ballad of Jesse James’”. He also notes that the ballad was frequently sung—to an unknown tune—at folk gatherings for over fifty years.
When I lie down at night to rest And slumber deep steals o’er me, As I close my heavy eyes in sleep, Dark visions pass before me.
I see a calm still moonlight night, No breath of air is stirring; No sound the silence breaks, except The wings of insects whirring.
I see a forest deep and dark, A man walks through it quickly, Now in the shade, now in the light Where the dark leaves mingle thickly.
A man with soft, brown, shining eyes, And gold brown hair o’er lying, And daring courage on his face, On his own strength relying.
He treads the darksome forest through, Where outlaws lie in hiding, No fearful thought in his strong heart, The thought of fear, deriding.
He is a bold, true officer Attending to his duty, No thought he gives to nature bright, Nor the night’s calm, holy beauty.
He follows scraps of paper thrown Into the path before him, By one in whom his trust he placed Who threw a glamour o’er him.
He’s walking swiftly to his doom, But alas! He does not know it; He sees naught of the danger there, Oh, God! If thou would show it!
A little distance on ahead Are two oak trees, o’er bending, Behind which two cold hearted men Evil faced are standing.
Crouched, with weapons cocked in hand, Awaiting for his coming, They make no sound to warn their prey Of the awful risk he’s running.
He’s nearer, he’s almost in their hands, Will nothing now delay him From those who plotted, worked and planned To murder and betray him?
Ah! No, for now he steps along In the path marked out before him; He sees the fiendish daces not, No sense of fear steals o’er him.
Another step, Great God! A shot! Of oaths and groan a medley; Another shot! And the ground around With his lifeblood, gleams redly.
“Tis done, a noble soul is sent to the land of Heavenly Glory; a brave detective low is laid by hands all red and gory.
O, Heavenly Father, pity her, Whose heart will now be broken, Grant her in mercy, from thy throne, Some sweet, peace-giving token.
Help her to bear the awful blow, Her heart with thy grace cover; She, in the far off “Lone Star” state, Awaits her husband lover.
Be thou a friend to this fair child, As much as to the mother, Oh, Father of the fatherless, Than Thee, they have no other.
The murderers, here, may still go free, By lawyers shrewd, defended, Free in this world, but yet the next, Shall see their triumph – ended. –Dottie Moore
