“This notice gives to all who covet
Baiting the bull, and dearly love it.”
Fox-hunting, too, was beloved of the British visitors, and of Southern planters as well. The Middle and Southern states saw frequent meets of mounted gentlemen with hounds, usually at the tavern, to which they returned after the day’s run to end with suitable jollity.
The old English “drift of the forest” became in America a wolf-rout or wolf-drive. Then circles of men and boys were formed to drive in toward the centre of the ring and kill squirrels and hares which pestered the farmers. Then came shooting matches in which every living wild creature was a prey. The extent to which these devastating hunting parties could be carried is shown by an article in a Bedford County (Pennsylvania) newspaper. On Friday, December 4, 1818, about seven hundred men from neighboring townships formed such a party. The signal was first given on French Town Mountain, and the circle of forty miles of horn blowing to horn was completed in fifteen minutes. The hunters progressed to a centre in Wysox township, using guns as long as they could with safety, then bayonets, clubs, poles, pitchforks, etc. Five bears, nine wolves, and fourteen foxes were killed, and three hundred deer—it makes one’s heart ache. It was estimated that more than double the number escaped. The expedition closed with great mirth at the tavern.
Sign-board of
Wolfe Tavern,
Brooklyn, Connecticut.
I find through many legal reports and accounts of trials and arrests, that upper rooms in the taverns were frequently used as lockups or temporary jails. Mr. S. L. Frey, of Palatine Bridge, in his charming account of olden days in that town, tells an amusing episode of tavern life connected with this custom. Near the village schoolhouse lived a man named Fisk—a quiet citizen, friendly to the boys, but given, however, to frequent disappearances, and a profound reticence as to his means of livelihood which was naturally a distinct grievance and indeed an injustice to every respectably inquisitive neighbor. The boys noted that he was a great lover of horses, and seemed to have a constant succession of new ones in his stable, and that these newcomers vanished in as silent and unaccountable a manner as they had arrived.
One morning the scholars were excited and delighted to learn that the band of horse thieves that had for years ravaged the valley had at last been ferreted out, the two leaders captured and safely lodged during the night in the village jail, namely, a doubly locked and outside bolted room in Uncle Jesse Vincent’s tavern. And the climax of all the excitement and pleasure was the fact that Neighbor Fisk was the leader of the gang.
Court was called in the tavern parlor at noon. The sheriff and his officers, lawyers from neighboring towns, all importance and pomposity, all the men and all the boys from miles around were waiting eagerly to see once more the mysterious Fisk, when a loud shout came from the men who had gone to lead forth the prisoners that both had escaped. Of course they had! An open window, a leanto roof, a trellis and a high fence,—no decent prisoner could help escaping.
But they had been startled in their plans, and hurried while exchanging clothes, and it was plain from the garments left behind that one man had vanished clad only in his shirt, stockings, and shoes. The dire confusion of the first mortifying discovery soon changed to organized plans of pursuit, and the chase turned to a great piece of woodland behind the tavern. Oak and hickory with undergrowth of witchhazel—a prime place for partridges and gray squirrels—led back from the river to the hills and a deep gorge filled with solemn pines and hemlocks.
The rampant boys were snubbed early in the day by the sheriff and told to keep back; and one tall boy—“mad” at the insult—conceived the plan of personating the thief. He was a famous runner, the best in the school. He hid his coat in a hollow log, pulled his shirt over his trousers, Chinaman fashion, worked his way around on the edge of the hunting party, and was soon “discovered” by his boy friends, whose shouts of “Stop thief!” “Here he is!” brought the whole army of searchers after him. Oh! what a hunt followed. All were on foot, for no horses could pass through the heavy undergrowth; the white flag of the pursued fluttered in and out far in front into the swamp, under the bushes. Talk of hare and hounds! no game was ever run like that. The fleet young horse thief in front easily distanced the puffing sheriffs in the rear, and at last the pursuit was given over. Fisk escaped, thanks to his friends the boys, but the story of the wrath that was visited on the conspirators when their fun was discovered the next day at the tavern is “another story.”