[From _Pioneer Life in Kentucky_ (Cincinnati, 1870)]
Mayslick, although scarcely a village, was at once an emporium and
capital for a tract of country six or eight miles in diameter, and
embracing several hundred families, of which those in father's
neighborhood were tolerably fair specimens. Uncle Abraham Drake kept a
store, and Shotwell and Morris kept taverns; besides them there were a
few poor mechanics. Uncle Cornelius Drake was a farmer merely, and
lived a little out of the center of the station; the great men of
which were the three I have just named. With this limited population,
it seems, even down to this time, wonderful to me that such gatherings
and such scenes should have been transacted there. They commenced
within five years after its settlement, and increasing with the
progress of surrounding population, continued in full vigor long after
I left home for Cincinnati. It was the place for holding regimental
militia musters, when all the boys and old men of the surrounding
country, not less than those who stood enrolled, would assemble; and
before dispersing at night, the training was quite eclipsed by a
heterogeneous drama of foot racing, pony racing, wrestling, fighting,
drunkenness and general uproar. It was also a place for political
meetings and stump conflict by opposing candidates, and after
intellectual performances there generally followed an epilogue of
oaths, yells, loud blows, and gnashing of teeth. Singing-schools were
likewise held at the same place in a room of Deacon Morris's tavern. I
was never a scholar, which I regret, for it has always been a grief
with me that I did not learn music in early life. I occasionally
attended. As in all country singing-schools, sacred music only was
taught, but in general there was not much display of sanctity. I have
a distinct remembrance of one teacher only. He was a Yankee, without a
family, between forty and fifty years of age, and wore a matted mass
of thick hair over the place where men's ears are usually found. Thus
protected, his were never seen, and after the opinion spread abroad
that by some misfortune they had been cut off, he "cut and run."
The infant capital was, still further, the local seat of justice; and
Saturday was for many years, at all times I might say, the regular term
time. Instead of trying cases at home, two or three justices of the
peace would come to the Lick on that day, and hold their separate
courts. This, of course, brought thither all the litigants of the
neighborhood with their friends and witnesses; all who wished to
purchase at the store would postpone their visit to the same day; all
who had to replenish their jugs of whiskey did the same thing; all who
had business with others expected to meet them there, as our city
merchants, at noon, expect to meet each other on 'change; finally, all
who thirsted after drink, fun, frolic, or fighting, of course, were
present. Thus Saturday was a day of largely suspended field labor, but
devoted to public business, social pleasure, dissipation, and beastly
drunkenness. You might suppose that the presence of civil magistrates
would have repressed some of these vices, but it was not so. Each day
provided a bill of fare for the next. A new trade in horses, another
horse race, a cock-fight, or a dog-fight, a wrestling match, or a
pitched battle between two bullies, who in fierce encounter would lie on
the ground scratching, pulling hair, choking, gouging out each other's
eyes, and biting off each other's noses, in the manner of bull-dogs,
while a Roman circle of interested lookers-on would encourage the
respective gladiators with shouts which a passing demon might have
mistaken for those of hell. In the afternoon, the men and boys of
business and sobriety would depart, and at nightfall the dissipated
would follow them, often two on a horse, reeling and yelling as I saw
drunken Indians do in the neighborhood of Fort Leavenworth, in the
summer of 1844. But many would be too much intoxicated to mount their
horses, and must therefore remain till Sunday morning.