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99 CHAPTER 5 The Sounds of Humankind The pioneer baby might from time to time be weighed on the family steelyards, and he might not be. He would by the time he could talk have heard all manner of human sounds from scalp cry to the calling of the hogs, but one thing he would never hear as they weighed him or on any other occasion of his life was the word normal. The normal human being had not yet evolved. No first settler, risking death and loss of all his goods when he could have lived comfortably in a safe place, would today be considered normal. Could the average citizen of today see and hear Andrew Jackson, partly intoxicated with liquor but more so by his own wrath, eyes blazing, spittle drooling, black oaths flying as he chased a man with a fence rail, or charged down the center of a long food- and drink-laden banquet table,1 he would probably call the police. John Rains, painted and dressed like an Indian, slipping through the woods with Abraham Castleman, got up in the same way, would to many be a more heart-chilling sight than an Indian on the warpath. Fresh scalps, the dried blood yet dark red instead of black, might today frighten even our TV-hardened children, but young Abraham Mason, after looking up from his book in a school down on Richland Creek to see white men riding by with prisoners and scalps, “upon long canes, carrying them like colors,”2 went back to his lessons with a lighter, warmer heart. The night before he had, with others of the community, sat up with the neighbors, killed and scalped by Indians. And now the dead were revenged. He and others accepted the scalps Edmund Jennings wore at his belt just as they accepted Edmund. It was right and proper a man should make his will before fighting a duel or going into battle as did he. Edmund directed that if he died at Nickojack, his cows should be driven into Daniel Smith’s range, and there killed and left for the wolves; the wolves would come 100| Chapter 5 quickly to the dead cattle, but would soon turn from them to the general’s stock and so destroy, Edmund hoped, the rich man’s cattle.3 Colonel Daniel Ridley, living down near Buchanan’s, was a stern, strict man4 who, like most of those around him, had never learned the art of keeping shut for: “What he felt he professed and what he professed he felt. It was his fashion to avoid all circumlocution and to speak plainly; he flattered no man, feared no man, and courted no man; when he spoke he was believed; when he promised his word was never forfeited.”5 And if Colonel Ridley wanted to keep his coffin ready made and waiting along with burying clothes, that was his business, though many commented on Daniel Ridley’s coffin. It was somewhat unusual to make such preparations for death. The pioneers as a group had a great love of life and a flair for living; life was too fine a thing to ruin with overmuch quarreling at death or anything else they could not change. All the original settlers had, before the end of the first year, seen not only men, women, and children mutilated and dead, but others dying slowly of painful, hopeless wounds, for at this date and for many years to come, any man shot in the abdomen knew he must die. Colonel John Donelson, shot in the woods with only two companions and these chance strangers, pushed his intestines back in, got a leech for he was near a creek, put it into the wound, and even ate and walked about,6 knowing no doubt that it was all a waste of time, but like other men of his day, living, doing what he could until he died, never waiting. The Indian Wars were scarcely ended before the dueling began. The actual pioneers had needed no duels, but others went out at dawn to the chosen place, knowing they would die and having made their wills accordingly .7 Men usually tried to keep such matters from their womenfolks, and as a result, some wives like Rachel Jackson lived in eternal dread of “dueling business.”8 Rachel in time sought the consolation that many in later years found on the Cumberland, that of religion, the exercise of which...

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