William Orlando Butler, one of General Lew Wallace's favorite poets,
was born near Nicholasville, Kentucky, in 1791. He was the son of
Percival Butler, a noted Revolutionary soldier. He was graduated from
Transylvania University, Lexington, in 1812. Butler studied law for a
short time, but the War of 1812 called him and he enlisted. At the
River Raisin he was wounded and captured and carried through Canada to
Fort Niagara, but he was later exchanged. Butler was with General
Jackson at the battle of New Orleans, and his gallantry attracted the
attention of the general, who placed him upon his staff. In 1817
Butler returned to the law, married, and settled in the little river
town of Carrollton, Kentucky, on the Ohio, his home henceforth. In
July, 1821, the first draft of his famous poem, _The Boatman's Horn_
(then called _The Boat Horn_), was published in _The Western Review_,
a monthly magazine of Lexington, Kentucky. In describing his boyhood
days at Covington, Indiana, General Lew Wallace very charmingly writes
of his early love for the Wabash river, and for old Nebeker, the
lonesome ferryman, who "welcomed me for my company. On the farther
side, chained to a tree, he kept a long tin horn. A traveller, coming
to the bank and finding us on the townward side, blew to get our
attention ... when the voice of the big horn on the thither side
called to us--How it startled me! What music there was in it! What
haste I made to unship my oar!... And if since then I have been an
ardent fisherman, believing with my friend Maurice Thompson that
"Halcyon prophecies come to pass
In the haunts of the bream and bass;"
and if the song of Butler, the soldier-poet of Kentucky--
"Oh, boatman, wind that horn again!
For never did the joyous air
Upon its lambent bosom bear
So wild, so soft, so sweet a strain"--
is still a favorite of mine, with power to stir my pulses and return
me to a freak of childhood full of joyousness alloyed only with
thought of my mother's fears, the shrewd reader will know at once how
such tastes inured to me. And as swimming seems to have been one of my
natural accomplishments, I must have acquired it during my days at the
ferry." This is far and away the best background for Butler's poem
that has been done, and with it before the reader the famous poem must
mean more to him. The poem was subsequently published as the
title-poem in a small collection of his verse, entitled _The Boatman's
Horn and Other Poems_. From 1839 to 1843 Butler was a Kentucky
Congressman; and in 1844 the unsuccessful candidate for governor of
Kentucky. Upon his Mexican War record, General Butler was nominated by
the Democratic party for vice-president of the United States with
General Lewis Cass, of Michigan, as the head of the ticket, but they
were defeated by Martin Van Buren and Charles Francis Adams. In 1855
General Butler declined the governorship of the territory of Nebraska;
and in 1861 he went to Washington as a member of the famous "Peace
Congress." General Butler died at his home, Carrollton, Kentucky,
August 6, 1880, in the ninetieth year of his age. Though famous as a
soldier and politician, _The Boatman's Horn_ is the work that will
keep his name green for many years; and several of his other poems are
not to be utterly despised.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Biographical Sketch of Gen. William O. Butler_, by
F. P. Blair, Senior (Washington, 1848), was reprinted in full in
_The Kentucky Yeoman_ (Frankfort, June 15, 1848); _The Poets and
Poetry of the West_, by W. T. Coggeshall (Columbus, Ohio, 1860);
Lew Wallace's _Autobiography_ (New York, 1906).