The challenge was sent May 22, and Dickinson promptly accepted it through his second, Dr. Catlett, and named the day of meeting at seven o’clock Friday morning, May 30, 1806, at Harrison Mills, on Red River, in Logan County, Ky. Jackson objected strenuously to postponing it a week. He wanted to fight the next day and sent Overton, his second, to see Catlett and have the date changed. Catlett said Dickinson did not have his pistols ready. Jackson offered to give him his choice of his own, and added: “For God’s sake, let this business be brought to an issue immediately, as I cannot see after publication why Mr. Dickinson should wish to put it off until Friday.”
But Dickinson would not yield, and for a week the impetuous Jackson could only chafe and wait.
From Nashville to Harrison Mills, in Logan County, Ky., is fully fifty miles across country. Horseback was the only mode of travel through the new country then, but a ride of fifty miles a day, used to horseback as they were, and riding such horses as he rode, was no unusual thing for him.
The Sulphur Spring—“The Great French Lick,” as it appears to-day on Cherry Street, Nashville. Quere: What would the buffalo and hunters of old have thought of that thing in their day, with a negro in the tower?
(Photo March, 1906, by E. E. Sweetland.)
Dickinson arose Thursday morning before day. His young wife was sleeping by his side and knew nothing of it. He dressed then awakened her and kissed her with more than usual tenderness: “Good-bye, darling. I shall be sure to be home to-morrow night.”
“Where are you going?” she asked, surprised. “Oh, just over into Kentucky on a little matter of business. I will be back to-morrow night.”
He started out, but she called him back and kissed him again. He laughed boyishly, recklessly at the look of doubt and fear that had crept into her eyes for she had heard rumors only of what the whole town knew, but it never occurred to her that the tragedy was so near.
It was a gay, rollicking crowd of a half-dozen young men who joined Dickinson for his ride across two counties to Kentucky. Never was a more hilarious party. They took short cuts. They galloped across dangerous places, displaying horsemanship and nerve. They drank and made the woods echo with their shouts. Before he left Nashville, Dickinson had bet $500 that he would kill his man—that he would put his ball within a half-inch of the coat button over Jackson’s heart. When they stopped for dinner, he amused the crowd with his wonderful marksmanship. He tied a string between two trees and three times he cut it in twain with his pistol ball. At twenty-four feet he put four bullets in a spot no larger than a silver dollar. “When General Jackson comes along here,” he said to the landlord of the little eating house, “show him these.”