Ticket to Ride

I’ve previously written about my summer’s deep-dive into the old issues of the Daily Herald, the Biloxi-Gulfport newspaper, specifically looking for the columns and other articles written by my Great-great Uncle Crab Breland. His weekly, and sometimes twice-weekly, output was enough to keep me plenty busy, but the task took much longer that I anticipated as I was continually distracted from the target of my research by the many fascinating articles that were the news of the day some 100 years ago in Big Level and Wiggins and the surrounding southeast Mississippi and larger area. Almost every issue had something that caught my eye and threw me off track.

There were two local murders in the summer of 1913 that made headlines—of course I had to follow the details of both investigations and, in the case of one, the later trial and conviction. The first involved the death of Dr. Cowart, a prominent Bond, Mississippi, physician. The incident could have been the storyline for a Perry Mason episode. It seems that Dr. Cowart and a family friend left the wedding party that was ongoing at the Cowart house for a little trip out into the woods so that they could have a few drinks. According to the testimony of two teenaged boys who witnessed the incident, Dr. Cowart and his friend began to argue; a fistfight ensued that ended when the friend knocked the doctor unconscious with a short 2x4 that was lying nearby. The doctor died from his injury a few hours later and the friend was convicted of manslaughter after a week-long trial. The second killing was the roadside ambush of a cousin I didn’t know I had, Travis Miles, a young unmarried man from Big Level. Travis left Wiggins for his home in the early evening with $200 he’d just received in a business transaction. His horse and buggy were found in the road the following morning about eight miles east of town and Travis was found in the woods nearby with his neck broken and “marks of violence on his head and face.” As it was reported, Travis had asked for a gun before leaving town and the sheriff’s deputy had loaned him a pistol. The investigation was followed in the newspaper for a week or two—bloodhounds were involved—but nothing was ever learned about the assailant’s identity or the missing money and pistol.

Other interesting cases also captured my attention—the New Orleanian woman who shot to death her married lover then sat down and waited for the police, the Birmingham Moose Lodge initiation that killed two initiates with a 2,000-volt electric shock, and the painter who encountered a hornets’ nest 184 feet up high on the building he was painting and lived to tell about it despite scores of stings. There were numerous articles relating to the advent of automobiles and early road building in the area. I learned that in 1915, when Stone was still a part of Harrison, there were 684 miles of roads in the county (not including incorporated municipalities); none were paved and over half were not even graded. Also in 1915, the first ever organized automobile tour in the state was big news. The route from Jackson to Gulfport, was a festive 2-day trip with a number of politicians, merchants, and other prominent citizens participating. But one topic seemed to be in the local news as much or more than any other during the first quarter of the 1900s: Texas cattle fever and cattle tick eradication.

Texas fever, also known as red-water fever and the bloody murrain, has been known to infect cattle and other livestock for centuries. Some even think it was one of the biblical plagues visited upon the Egyptians—the “murrain of the beasts” (Exodus 9:3). In this country, it has long been recognized that the disease can be spread when cattle are moved from one area to another. Back in the cattle drive years, cattle immune to the fever would cause heavy death losses when driven into non-infected areas. North Carolina, in 1795, was the first state in the nation to enact a quarantine law after it was discovered that the disease seemed to be triggered when cattle from areas where oak trees were predominant were moved to the longleaf pine sections of the state. But the trees weren’t the problem; it would be nearly another 100 years before it became generally accepted that cattle ticks were the culprits. By the 1890s the USDA’s Bureau of Animal Industry began efforts to establish federal guidelines to protect non-infected areas of the country from those principally southern states that were infected. By 1906, there were federally-instituted quarantine lines between the North and the South and major state and federal efforts were begun to encourage and require that stockmen treat the infected cattle and their pastures with solutions to kill the ticks. Eventually, the most effective method to kill ticks was to dip the cattle in an arsenical bath. As a result, cattle dipping vats were built all across the South, often constructed by individual stock owners. Initially, individual counties held votes on tick eradication alternatives, hoping for full cooperation among the local farmers and ranchers. Later, states began passing compulsory state-wide dipping laws. With time, the cattle ticks were licked. But it wasn’t easy, and it took years. There would be periods when some counties and some whole states would be declared tick free only to have new flare-ups and new rounds of eradication measures handed down. Such was the life of a southern cattleman over a period of forty years or so until the problem was eliminated all across the region.

 
Cattle dipping (Alamy stock photo — pun not intended but well savored)

Cattle dipping (Alamy stock photo — pun not intended but well savored)

 

Even though these coordinated efforts were successful, they were not without opposition. And sometimes that opposition turned violent, with government officials being shot and with dipping vats being dynamited. Sporadic malevolent acts such as these were a problem throughout the South, and Mississippi and Stone County were not exempt, as evidenced by Uncle Crab’s September 1921 report:

“VAN O’NEAL HERE SATURDAY: Van O’Neal from the old Beatrice neighborhood near Ramsay Springs was a visitor to Wiggins Saturday. Mr. O’Neal stated that things were quiet in his neighborhood for the past few days, nothing of importance happening there since the blowing up of three dipping vats a week or so ago. The vats that were dynamited were known as the Noah Walker Vat, the E. J. Bond Vat and the A. H. Bond Vat. This is the first violence committed in Stone county by any anti-dipping parties and has caused not a little excitement throughout the area.” [The Biloxi-Gulfport Daily Herald newspaper, 13 Sep 1921, p6]

(Note: The Beatrice community is where my Bond grandparents lived and where my mother grew up. It lies just below Big Level, across Red Creek in the southeastern section of Stone County. The O’Neals were their neighbors.)

A week later, Crab reported again on “those everlasting cattle ticks,” describing a situation in which a man, and his cattle ticks, too, presumably, had a ticket to ride:

“On Monday of this week, a seven-yoke team of oxen hitched to a massive wagon bearing a mixed cargo of household furniture, kitchen utensils, chicken coops, ox feed and other junk drove through Upper Big Level into Wiggins. As good luck or bad luck would have it, they fell into the arms, as it were, of J. W. Tiny and J. C. Davis, two of Stone County's cattle inspectors, who looked them over and discovered that the oxen had a right smart sprinkling of those everlasting cattle ticks sticking to their hides. It was ascertained from the driver that the team was from New Augusta and belonged to Walter Myers, Ex-Sheriff of Perry County, and that he had a permit from the inspector of that county to move the cattle across the line. After gathering all the ticks they could find, and boxing them up for shipment, our inspectors permitted the driver to proceed under the promise that he would stop at a vat some five miles further along the road and dip the oxen, after which we presume he was to continue his journey to some place unknown to this writer. As far as news is concerned this is all—but there’s a bushel and three pecks more that we could say if we felt like it, and thought it would do any good. If the young man in charge of this team had a permit lawfully issued by the legally-constituted authorities, we see where no blame can attach to him, provided he carried out his promise to dip the cattle when he reached the vat, but even should he go further and "Dip them seven times in Jordan" we cannot see where we have anywhere to speak of. This will not change the hopeless system under which we are working. To go still further and reveal another of our state secrets, we will say that we are in doubt as to whether Stone County cattle were in danger of becoming infested from these Perry County oxen or whether the said oxen were in danger of getting other ticks beside those brought with them. But be that as it may, the tick eradication work seems to be getting bigger at the little end, and the system is a failure regardless of who it at fault. We frequently hear it said that the work would have been over by now if everybody had done their duty. That may be true, but everybody has never been known to do their duty at the same time, and it’s hard to tell the particular ‘Everybody’ who is at fault. If everybody would do their duty, we would have no murders or robberies. We would have none of a lot of things that we do have, and have a whole lot of what we have not. If it was not for that little ‘if’ we would not be writing this, and if we don't stop, we may keep on until we say something.” [The Biloxi-Gulfport Daily Herald newspaper, 23 Sep 1921, p3]

Wow, Mark Twain was right, history may not repeat itself but it quite often rhymes. Both of these two news items from 1921 clearly show the frustration suffered by many over the restrictive quarantine laws, reminding us of how frustrated we are, a hundred years later, here in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. Crab’s lament that this “would have been over by now if everybody had done their duty” is the heart of today’s mask-or-not-mask quandary. Like him, I just don’t understand why rational people won’t do right. To me it seems simple enough, do the right thing, y’all: Wear the mask.

We’d better leave it at that. If we keep on, we just might say something.

Notes:

A WORD TO PONDER

mur·rain (noun): Any of various diseases of cattle, as anthrax, foot-and-mouth disease, and Texas fever. A plague, epidemic, or crop blight.
Source: dictionary.com

SONG OF THE DAY

“Ticket To Ride” by The Beatles (Help!, 1965)

 
 
Russell Lott8 Comments