The same tradition claims that the body was hauled from the cabin to the graveyard upon a rough wooden frame or sled, and that such was the disorder of the journey that the corpse was jolted off the sled and “tumbled on its face in a little bottom,” on the banks of Waxhaw Creek, near the crossing.
The man who was riding the horse, which was hitched to the sled, had not known that he had lost his load until one of the funeral party in advance, happening to look back, saw “the sled bouncing up and down, in a very light way.”
They had to go back miles before they came to the spot where the body had rolled off the sled.
The numerous biographers of Andrew Jackson have shunned this local tradition as something entirely too horrible to put in print; yet books are only valuable to the extent that they tell the truth. The story is useful as an illustration of the extreme roughness of frontier conditions at that time; the poverty of the Jacksons, and the rude simplicity of border funerals.
The immigrant had gone into the unbroken wilderness to build his log cabin; and apparently there was no wagon road from his “clearing” to the Waxhaw Settlement.
The use of the wooden frame or sled to carry the body on, would indicate more strongly the lack of a road than the lack of a wagon, for, even though the Jacksons had no such vehicle, the Waxhaw relatives would have brought one if there had been a passable road. The corpse, tumbling off the sled and being left behind on its face in the little bottom, is uncanny, but to the dead the uncanny is not the uncommon.
The brilliant soldier—son of the Emperor Charles V—Don John of Austria, who broke the sea-power of the Turks in the battle of Lepanto, died dismally in the Netherlands; and his body was carried on horse-back to Spain, in two sacks—half of the body in one sack and half in the other.
When Abraham Lincoln died, his face discolored so rapidly that those in charge, to save the feelings of the people who would want to gaze upon the revered features, painted out the shocking discoloration; and, thus artificially masked, the martyred President was borne to his tomb.
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The widow Jackson and her two little boys did not go back to the distant, lonely cabin on Twelve Mile Creek. From the church-ground where the husband and father had been buried, they went to the home of George McCamie, who had married Mrs. Jackson’s sister. Here, within a fortnight of the funeral, a son was born to the widow; and this son she named Andrew, after his father.