By John T. Bristow
The hunt was staged in Uncle Nick Bristow’s timber — way back in the 70’s. It was on the home place over on the Rose branch, the farm now owned by Bill Mast. The trail of the hunters would range down stream, overlapping into the Jim Hyde and Bill Rose woods, and on down to the junction with Wolfley creek. Ostensibly, it was to have been a coon-hunt, but it soon developed into something bigger and better. ‘
There was a good moon—but to attract the hunters, a big bonfire was built in the woods, and the men flocked in from all directions. The interesting part of it was that three of them were from the old English Colony, two miles west of my uncle’s farm — ”Green Englishmen,” the Wolfley creekers said they were. Couldn’t name them now—and be sure. One of them was a stocky little man, very talkative, very agreeable.
Then there were the Porters, the Pickets, the Piatts, the Snows, the Mayers, the Barnes boys, and others—not aiming to overlook my Uncle Nick and his son, Burrel. The elder Mayers, Gus and Noah, were Pennsylvania Dutch, with Holland ancestry. Gus liked his fun while Noah liked to stay at home and mind his own business. But some of Noah’s boys were in the gathering, as was also Peter Metzdorf, who had a while back married Gus Mayer’s daughter, Anna. Peter was German—the real thing. He lived in Wetmore.
Of the five Porter brothers, Ambrose was the only one that I can now positively say was present. But John and Tom and their brothers-in-law, Bill Evans and Ben Summers, were probably around somewhere. Bill Porter had just married my Aunt Nancy, late of Tennessee, and he couldn’t come. And Ben Porter—well, they said he was too contrary to appreciate a good thing like this. Ambrose wore his red hair—it was really red—at shoulder length. He wore gold earrings, too, and three gutta-percha rings on one finger, rings he himself had made from old coat buttons.
It was good to have Roland Van Amburg with us. Roland was a grand old sport. Moreover, Roland Van Amburg had much in common with my Uncle Nick Bristow. They had both suffered, or were due to suffer, heavy losses in large herds of Texas cattle they had bought from Dr. W. L. Challis, of Atchison. It is barely possible that those cattle might have been milling about on the western part of Uncle Nick’s farm that night.
The bonfire was built on the edge of a small clearing, with a large tree backed up by a clump of small growth on the right. In the distance—not too distant—was a big log lying on the edge of a ravine, with a 10-foot bank at this point. A small tree with good height stood at the top end of the log on the left side of the clearing. One approaching from the north would see the log only after advancing so far, and even then only if not otherwise attracted. Had it been a plant for a modern movie scene it could not have been a more perfect setting for the thing that actually happened.
While yet around the bonfire the talk turned to panthers. One had reportedly been seen, or heard, in the woods a couple of miles away—up in the Rube Wolfley neighborhood. The men would be careful not to hunt that timber because they didn’t want their dogs to be torn to pieces. Uncle Nick owned a timber lot over in the panther country.
The natives saw in this hunt a chance to have some fun at the expense of the Englishmen. Also, they wanted to impress those Colonists in a way that might be the means of keeping them on their own reservation, so to speak. A lot of timber-stealing had been going on and the Colonists were suspicioned. As a matter of fact, timber-stealing in those days was widespread. But in that business the Colonists were no worse than the natives, but the Colonists were always sure to get the blame.
While people generally scoffed at the idea of panthers roaming the woods, there were some who said it was not altogether improbable—that one might have escaped from a menagerie. You must understand that practically all the older men here at that time had come from panther states back East—and, I might say, the rising generation had more or less been steeped in panther talk.