Appalachian History

Excerpt from “Ninety Pounds of Fight,’ by Tom Wallace, Nature Magazine, Feb. 1942

Because of politics Kentucky’s anti-steel-trap law, passed nearly four years ago, hangs in the balance. The Legislature meets in January. Between the law, which has not been fully enforced, and repeal, sought by conservatives who want to continue using steel traps, stands Lucy Furman. She weighs, maybe, ninety pounds, but is as full of fight—her kind of fight---as anybody in the Cumberland Mountains.

Miss Furman was educated at fashionable Sayre Institute, Lexington, and took a literature course at the University of Cincinnati. Early in life she began writing fiction. Soon after publishing ‘Stories of A Sanctified Town,’ in 1897, she became a worker in Hindman Settlement School, in the Kentucky Mountains.

There she wrote ‘Mothering on Perilous,’ ‘The Quare Women,’ ‘The Lonesome Road’ and other novels. These established her as an interpreter of mountain life. She became interested in conservation of wildlife when in contact with mountain trappers.

In 1928, she wrote an article, published by ‘The Atlantic Monthly,' on cruelty of trapping. The late Commander Edward Breck, who had founded the Anti-Steel-Trap League three years before, read the article and made its author Vice-president of the League.

In 1933 Vernon Bailey, chief naturalist of the United States Biological Survey, invented the humane leg-hold animal trap, not for profit, but in behalf of animals caught—at the rate of many millions every year---in traps that caused many of them to gnaw off the leg between the vice-like jaws of the steel trap and brought slow death in the trap to others. Foxes caught in steel traps sometimes die of burst ventricles of the heart, so great is their fear and suffering.

Steel trap, 1881, from Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making.

The less nervous animals manage to chew the flesh of the trapped leg, sometimes tearing the flesh from the bone and breaking the bone, leaving a paw in the trap when they hobble off, to die of starvation because they no longer have the physical equipment they must have to find their food. Not until the leg-hold trap was invented, and made available to manufactures by the inventor, was there hope of outlawing the steel trap.

There seemed to be little ground for hope that it would be outlawed in Kentucky when Miss Furman came to Frankfort and set up headquarters there. In 1934 her bill was beaten. She then began the work of an evangelist. By 1936 the Kentucky Federation of Women’s Clubs and many other organizations were her supporters.

She had only to call upon daily newspapers for editorial support and news column space, because all of them knew and valued her.

Foxhunters were her champions because steel traps catch and mutilate many fox hounds that have considerable money value and the deep affections of owners.

The bill failed in 1936.

In 1938 the Animal Trap Company of America, which had been the world’s largest maker of steel traps, began making leg-hold traps as a result of the intervention of R.E. Hinman, of the Belknap Hardware and Manufacturing Company, of Louisville. Mr. Hinman was a Nature lover and Miss Furman took her story of the new trap and the tortured animals to him, after 1936.
In 1938 Miss Furman, who had been known at two earlier sessions as ‘the trap woman,’ got her bill passed, to take effect in 1940.

Other traps designed to take furbearers without torture are now in the market. Several of them, for the smaller animals, have won annual prizes offered by the American Humane Association. An argument in behalf of such traps is that pelts are not injured by animals gnawing off legs, and that annual production of furbearers is not diminished by starvation of injured animals that escape, three-legged, from steel traps.

But trappers are ruralists. Ruralists do not like change under statutory compulsion. So, Miss Furman is on guard at Frankfort to prevent, if possible, repeal of the anti-steel-trap law.

If this stalwart crusader is able to keep the Kentucky Legislature under her influence until the trappers become used to the new-style traps nothing, presumably, would ever repeal her law.

Miss Furman accomplished, between 1934 and 1938, a task that seemed at first impossible of accomplishment.

Moneyless people as lobbyists for moneyless enterprises---people who have nothing to barter in the trades of politicians---are at a disadvantage at sessions of legislatures, and Lucy Furman pleads only a cause.

When, single-handed, she began asking law-makers to consider the situation of wild furbearers---“varmints” to ninety-nine of one hundred Kentucky legislators---her project seemed, to most observers, a more hopeless one than the education of Huckleberry Finn.

Will she now be able to persuade the legislature not to repeal her law when steel trap users, fearing its better enforcement, and utterly unconcerned about humaneness to wild animals, exert pressure?



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Chattanooga Times Free Press, 11/24/08: A state wildlife biologist predicts a record number of black bears will be taken during the current hunting season.

There are two periods during which dogs can be used to hunt bear — one in mid-November, the other during the first two weeks of December.

"Him and his brother-in-law one night back years ago, about forty, went out a-bear huntin', a-possum huntin' or other, and treed a bear. He minded up the tree till it come down. I shot it. It rolled off down the mountain a piece, tore loose from the dogs, and run away on down the flat and treed up another tree. We minded hit up there a good long while.

"Finally it come down from up there. We had us a big fire made up at the root of the tree. When it come down, why we had a good fire light to fight it by. When it come down, I shot again, didn't hit it the last time. When I shot it the last time, shot at it, why, just throwed my gun down and jumped a-straddle of it, grabbed it by both ears, me and my dogs. I thought I could help him and make him kill it, but I couldn't do that. I broke the dog's hold, seed I couldn't hold it myself, and I let it loose, started to run back around the tree.

"The bear took after me, just as I got around next to the fire the dogs caught it again. I turned around and jumped on it again a-straddle of it, called for the axe, and my brother-in-law, he'd had the axe to fight the bear with, and he'd laid it down and burnt the handle in two. He couldn't hardly find the axe, but he hadn't holped me a bit. He hadn't fit none of the time. When I got to hunting for the axe and reaching for the axe, I knocked it in the head ever so many licks before I could get it to roll over and hush hollering.

"Finally we got it killed, drug it around next to the fire, and I got to looking at it, just looked a-scared, to look at a bear a-thinkin' a man of my age or size would jump on a bear to fight fist and skull without something to fight with. So we killed it, brought it in home that night about daylight next morning. About as far as I can go with that."

Steve Cole,
Sugarlands, TN
1939
source: www.cas.sc.edu/engl/dictionary/transcripts/cole_steve.html



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"A long time ago, when Jack was growin' up, his daddy give him a brand new shotgun for Christmas. Obviously, Jack was as proud as a peacock over this new gift. He wanted to show his daddy just how proud he was by going out and gettin a whole mess of game on his first huntin trip. So, bright and early the very next morning, Jack jumped out of bed, threw on his overalls, boots, and jacket and flew out the door before breakfast. He got up so quick he even beat the crack of dawn.

"As the sun slowly yawned out over the horizon, Jack's shadow was beginning to cast out over Bear Creek. He figured that most of the small game around these here parts would be gettin themselves a drink, right smart early in the morning. Well it wasn't long before Jack's logic paid off.

"Just 40 feet ahead of where Jack stood sat two rabbits, one on each side of a large boulder. Sittin right purty on top of that boulder was a flat rock with a large gray squirrel eatin a hickory nut. Jack looked and calculated a bit. He raised his gun up under his chin and aimed. Boooom. One shot was all it took.

"Jack had hit that flat rock smack dab in the middle and broke it in half exactly under where that big old grey squirrel had been perched. Of course it instantly killed the squirrel. The flat rock's two broken pieces fell simultaneaously on each side of the boulder killing the two rabbits, in a moments notice.

"The kick from the double barrel shotgun was so strong that it knocked Jack clean out into the middle of the creek. It nearly took Jack the better part of 30 minutes to climb out of that creek. Reason being, his overalls had gotten so full of bass that he could barely climb up the bank.

"Finally, when it was able to get up the bank and out of the water his dad-burned butten come flyin off them overalls due to the overload of fish they contained. That button had such force that it flew at a whiz-bang velocity like a rocket into the woods and just happened to hit a twelve point buck running from all this excitement. When this deadly button hit him in mid-stride his momentum carried him nearly 60 feet before he landed and hit his antlers on another rock. This caused a portion of the antlers to become a fragmented projectile that flew into the next pasture killing the neighbors prize bull.

"All that there was left to do now was for Jack to gather up everything to carry home. The only problem was; how in the world was he going to carry 24 largemouth bass, 1 large grey squirrel, 2 fat rabbits, 1 very large slightly damaged deer, and a 2000 lb. prize bull home by himself? Now that would really be a story…"

Told in the Beech Mountain tradition, from the Wilson Library North Carolina Collections/University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

http://www.ibiblio.org/bawdy/folklore/hunt.html

related post: "The Jack Tales. Not just beanstalks"


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