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My father’s people were canny colonizers, peacefully getting a toe-holt in the alluvial fat river bottoms of our Kentucky peninsula after some at least of the trails slanting downward and westward across the barrens and through the canebrakes to those ultimate boundaries had been blazed. Statehood had come and the gunfire of border warfare was dimming out behind their caravan as they skirted the great central intervale to exercise rights of squatter sovereignty in a place of tall timbers and dense thickets and converging watersheds three hundred miles farther on.

But my mother’s people were of the true pathfinding kind and more than two decades earlier, a front guard of them had legged it through “The Gap” to contend for their holdings with red savages and white turncoats where temporarily the onward sweep of Colonial conquest was checked within a crescent of protective blockhouses on the flanks of the old Transylvanian plateau which since became famous as the Blue Grass section.

It seems there was a man-child born in Fairfax County, Virginia, during the opening year of the War for Independence whilst his Welsh-Scotch father was away soldiering with the Continental troops; and his name was James Saunders, but because of a whimsical salty manner of speech which afterward he had, he better was known as Dry-Talkin’ Jimmy or Jimmy Dry for short, so that still later on when, by virtue of volunteer service against the malignants in the dangersome wild domain beyond the mountains, he earned a veteran’s land grant, the papers read: “To James Saunders or James Dry, as the case may be.”

He was bound out to a journeyman tanner, but presently, being by then a lanky young apprentice, he gave up that dullish employment and as a very junior member of a squad of “Long Rifles” struck out toward where the sun went down. It would appear that herein he obeyed the destiny of his breed since already, years before, three of his senior brothers, besides a couple of uncles and a stray cousin or so, had gone upon the same difficult and precarious pilgrimage, following along on the moccasined heels, so to speak, of the first authentic explorers—Boone and Kenton and the rest of that audacious lot. In fact, it is set down on the files that the second Caucasian invader killed by the hostiles in the “Kain-tuckee Country” was a Saunders and a kinsman of his, a young scout from the Yadkin, down in North Carolina. And two of his sisters-in-law already had played a part in the defense of the log fort at Bryan’s station on the Elkhorn near Lexington; their names are on the tablet which tells how, in pretended indifference, the women went singing out of the stockade gates and down to the spring under the deceived eyes of the hidden besiegers and fetched up water for the famished fighting men. But this is a story, stiff with proud adjectives, which you’ll find in any Kentucky history book.

Now this laconic Jimmy Dry, who did his homeseeking with a fuke in his hand and a tomahawk at his belt, was my maternal great-grandfather. He had come a young ranger into this unmapped and as yet only partially conquered hinterland and he married young as was the fashion for those days. The wife he took was Jane Bartlett, whose people had lately traipsed up out of South Carolina, and at once this couple set in to make a start and raise a family. They built for themselves a slab cabin on a hillocky clearing six miles from Frankfort, the new state capital. A younger son of theirs, born there in 1808 and christened Reuben, was the only one of my grandparents still surviving when I came to be of a remembering age. He was such a one as would not easily be forgotten either—a tall, sparse, weather-beaten shape of a man with a mouth like a seam but, to offset that severity, a pair of the keenest, kindliest eyes that ever were. He was almost the silentest human being I have ever known—he saved on words as a miser saves on pennies—but he was never dour. He could be stern enough, but there was no glumness to him. Without saying anything at all he added zest to a company and, by listening with a grave serenity, exalted the talkers. Members of my own household have been known to express regret that this ancestral gift for reticence did not fall upon me. We won’t go into that.

For nearly half a century, until he passed the age for professional activities, he held undisputed rating as the leading physician—and probably the most beloved citizen—of the town of Paducah where twenty-odd of us, belonging to the first and second generations of his direct descendants, grew up about him. In all essential regards he fulfilled the ideal conception of that now almost vanished species—the old-fashioned general practitioner. I think he must have been born with the healing touch. Family tradition had it that as a child he ministered to crippled animals and sickly chickens and maintained a rail-fenced hospital of his own. And no sooner had he learned the craft of bookbinding—a genteel step upward for the son of a brush rover who barely could read and write—than my grandfather borrowed the money which saw him through medical college.^[1]

Living near by where he lived was an eccentric character called Charles Julian. This eccentricity assumed a worthy aspect. Being a bachelor and being, for that time and place, a wealthy man, this Charles Julian made loans to needy youths who showed promise in some given direction. Kentucky’s first notable sculptor and her first notable portrait painter were among the objects of his generosity. By the same token it was he who advanced the funds for the professional education of the young mechanic, Reuben Saunders. In 1873 when Asiatic cholera swept the world and invaded America, Paducah was one of the places devastated by the plague; its people died swiftly and by hundreds; the town coffin-maker, working day and night to hammer together boxes for the victims, was himself nailed up in the last box he made. More or less by accident, or rather, by mistake, he being half-dead with exhaustion and lack of sleep from tending the victims about him, my grandfather happened on an injection which proved so effective a check against the scourge’s further spread that the formula was named for him and several foreign governments bestowed decorations upon him. That same year word came that his early benefactor, now very aged, lay hopelessly ill upstate. My grandfather carried a little casket containing the medals and the ribbons to his bedside and told the dying man these things properly belonged to him. It was said the casket, by request of old man Julian, was buried with him. At any rate, the decorations were never seen in my grandfather’s latter years nor spoken of by him, nor were they found among his personal effects after he died.

In our town were numbers of elderly men who in cold weather wore fringed shawls draped over their shoulders, usually sober gray or dun-colored shawls. But a distinguished two of the oldsters—Doctor Saunders and Judge Dow Husbands—would have none of this. Winter times they swathed their long meager frames in bright blanket-robes just as their daddies before them had done. On a sharp morning it was a familiar sight to see this rawboned pair striding along together, as erect and as taciturn as the dead-and-gone chiefs whose trappings they had borrowed. Judge Husbands’ blanket was a brilliant red but my grandfather’s was of rich blue broadcloth. He told me once that never in all his life had he worn an overcoat. By dribs and snatches he used to tell me many things about his childhood and his youth, in that rude and husky settlement of his people upstate. To harken during these rare moments when the reminiscent mood laid hold on him was, for me, like reliving with him vivid phases of the pioneering scene, vastly more stirring than any passages one might read on printed pages. I didn’t have to imagine what happened, I seemed literally to be experiencing it myself.

Once, abruptly and seeming apropos of nothing at all, he said: “One of my uncles on my mother’s side, Uncle Gip Bartlett, was a master marksman; kept score of the bushwhackings and the skirmishes he’d been in by the scalps he’d taken. He had three—two black-haired ones and a tow-colored one that he’d lifted off a Tory he had the luck to bring down during a running bout up toward the Blue Licks. He set much store by those scalps; would pin them on his old hunting shirt when he turned out for a rally or a Muster Day. He’d always carry along a turkey-wing fan, Injun-fashion.”

He stopped there and left me tingling to beat a tuning fork.

Nearly always he reserved these briefened piecemeal recitals for special occasions. On Sunday he liked to drive out to his own farm in the lowlands or to the farms of friends of his where young chickens would be sacrificed for a dinner to his tastes and, in season, watermelons set to chill in the spring. It was a precious privilege when I was the grandchild chosen to accompany him because, aside from the joy of going visiting, I was reasonably assured that somewhere, going or coming, he would be reminded of some stirring frontier episode to which he had been eyewitness or possibly had been a participant in it.

Almost as clearly as I revive the physical picture of my grandfather, I recall the drugstoreish scent of strong medicines which clung always to his garments. So also after all this long, long time I can still piece together out of the scrapbag of my memory sundry related annals which had been embalmed in community folklore.

There was the tradition about the time when a sort of unofficial census showed that in the county were then living more than a hundred juveniles who, having been ushered into the world by his capable hands, had been named for him, so that on certain back roads about every other youngster one met would, if a male, answer to the hail of “Rube” or, if a girl, would be “Reubie” or “Reubina” or even “Reubelinda.”

There was the line attributed to the country wag who, commenting on the fact that the old man would have between the shafts of his battered buggy only the friskiest of half-broken colts, said: “Looks like every time Doctor Saunders gits him a hoss, its natchell gait is runnin’ away.”

There was the narrative of how a half-crazed man, nursing some vague grievance, armed himself with a great club and on a dark night waylaid my grandfather at his own doorstep. But my grandfather dodged as the murderous blow fell so that it missed his skull and landed on his left shoulder. Accordingly, he drew a horse pistol and neatly shot the enemy in the side with a leaden chunk the size of a scaly-bark hickory nut, then called the servants and had his assailant lugged indoors where he probed out the bullet and dressed the wound before giving heed to his own cracked shoulder blade.

Most often repeated of all, though, was the legend about the lawsuit over a land deal which had been brought against him by a chronic litigant who, through marriage, was distantly related to his house. When the case was called for trial the patriarch appeared in court without an attorney, although one of his sons-in-law was a member of the bar and a majority of its other members were included among his regular patients, or anyhow their families were.

“Doctor,” said the amazed judge, “do I understand that you are going into this hearing without being represented by counsel?”

The defendant stood up and scratched among his chin whiskers. I’m sure he must have done so because, to the best of my recollection, he always scratched at those half-moon whiskers before risking speech.

“This is the first time I was ever sued,” he stated. “If this land doesn’t belong to me I don’t want it. If it does belong to me I’m going to have it.”

“But, Doctor, what do you expect to do?”

“Testify.”

Which he did, and in jig time the jury returned a judgment in his favor. Afterward some maintained that the evidence offered by him on the witness stand that day formed the longest consecutive statement ever delivered by old Doctor Saunders. But they were wrong there. I’m reasonably sure the longest unbroken speech he ever made was made when he was past his eightieth birthday, and made to an audience consisting of one eager-eared small boy. I was that boy and now for the first time I am recording in writing substantially what he said. Until then I’d never heard him utter, at one stretch, two hundred words. Now, having unlocked his lips, he went on, I should say, for ten or fifteen minutes, which in itself, was a wondrous thing.

Thinking back, I can summon up a coherent vision of that autumnal afternoon and two sitting together on a log, the octogenarian and the sapling in his early teens, at the edge of a cypress slash above a little lazy by-creek which loafed along at the back side of my grandfather’s shorn tobacco patch. He began, as usual, without preamble. He said:

“One of my father’s older brothers took up with a Cherokee squaw. This was soon after he came out to Kentucky, about the time the Revolutionary War ended. I don’t know whether he married her. It was a thing the family didn’t talk about afterward, although, back yonder, there was a lot of that sort of thing going on. By this Indian woman my uncle had a son who was named Nathaniel Saunders, but while he still was a shaver people took to calling him Bull Saunders: he had such a fierce temper and was so strong physically. Even in a country as raw and rough as that was, he had a hard reputation, from boyhood on up. This is hearsay with me. He was gone from those parts when I came along.

“The explanation was that, to get rid of him, he’d been sent off as a student to West Point soon after West Point was founded. According to the same story, he made a showing up there on at least two counts—his aptitude at military strategy and his quarrelsome disposition. He hadn’t been there more than a year or two, they said, when he got into real trouble. The daughter of a man who ran a ferry between Garrison and the Point told her father Cadet Saunders had been intimate with her and the father made threats. A few days later the ferryman’s body was found in the Hudson River with the head battered in. That’s the next chapter in the tale as I myself got it much later on. Naturally suspicion fell on young Saunders. On the eve of being arrested, he disappeared after telling a classmate that he wasn’t guilty, but since nobody liked him he wouldn’t stand a ghost of a show to prove his innocence. His father’s race had cast him out; he had no friends, was to everybody a wood’s colt and a mongrel. All right then, if America was going to cast him out, he’d devote the rest of his life to hating the whole breed of Americans and getting even with them. First thing though was to get away.

“That wouldn’t be hard. All he had to do was to climb the mountains behind West Point and strike off into the wild country to the southwest. Most of it was still Indian country. He was swarthy and black-haired. He spoke at least one Indian language, probably had smatterings of others. He’d get along in the deep woods if anybody could.

“Now then, here’s a wide gap in the sequence. We’ve got to jump to the year 1836 when the Texans under Sam Houston captured the infamous Santa Anna at the Battle of San Jacinto. Although Santa Anna was a prisoner of the new Republic of Texas, the Texans, by some mysterious means, induced the United States Government to take over custody of him. With a guard of dragoons he was carried across country to Washington and later was sent back on a naval vessel to Mexico. If you’ll read up on him you’ll find he was a dictator and once or twice a president of Mexico and in at least two campaigns was commander-in-chief of her armies and finally died somewhere down there in obscurity and disgrace. He was one of the greediest, cruelest men that ever lived on this continent, I reckon, but he was a scientific soldier and a genius in his twisted way, and he left his mark in history.

“Well, when Santa Anna and his escort of troopers got as far as Frankfort, in this state, on their way to Washington, they stayed overnight in an old tavern that stood on a hill back of town. I was still calling Frankfort home then, but I wasn’t there to see what happened—if it actually did happen. I’d gotten my medical degree at Philadelphia and was headed for Alabama to start practicing in partnership with another young doctor who was a distant connection of my mother’s people from South Carolina. Eventually we split up and I came on back to Kentucky and he went to New York. Read up on Doctor Marion Sims, too, when you get ’round to it, son. He’s called the Father of American Surgery and deserves that great name.

“By all accounts there was a mighty to-do on the night Santa Anna got to Frankfort. Among the Kentuckians who’d gone west to help the Texans get free from Mexico were several volunteers from that immediate section and to the last man they’d been slaughtered by Santa Anna’s orders at the Goliad Massacre. So a crowd of the kinfolks and friends of these dead boys decided they’d just take old Santa Anna out and string him up for a cold-blooded murderer. They got some of the dragoons drunk and overpowered the others—that’s the way the story runs, anyhow—but at the very last minute they changed their minds about it and there was no neck-stretching.

“The reason why they’d changed their minds, as I heard the explanation, was this: Three men were selected to go into the tavern and fetch the victim out. But as they broke into the room where he was quartered and he sat up in bed, the leader of the delegation almost dropped dead from surprise when the man in the bed called out his name and, as a blood relation, pleaded for mercy. And he professed to recognize the other two lynchers, too, claiming they’d been urchins together in that very neighborhood.

“Under pledge of secrecy he told them that after refugeeing from West Point he had kept on going until he made his way deep into Mexico; had learned Spanish on his way; had twisted his English name around backward and shortened it up so that it became Santa Anna; had given himself a fictitious birthplace in Mexico and a spurious family tree; and had used his earlier training to such effect that he rose to the highest rank in the Mexican Army and eventually was butchering his own countrymen at Goliad and the Alamo and other places. But he excused these wholesale executions on the ground of military necessity. He begged hard. I reckon he must have been a good talker. Besides, he was talking for his life.

“It wasn’t mercy though, that influenced the three who’d heard him, so much as it was the thought of the shame that would be put upon their people and their state if this confession got out. And among themselves they agreed to hush up the incredible disclosures they’d just listened to. Then they went back out to where the main crowd was and successfully argued that to hang a man under the protection of the United States flag would probably involve, not alone them, but Kentucky, with the Federal authorities. So the mob broke up and scattered.

“But such an amazing thing couldn’t be kept quiet. It leaked out although always there were efforts, by denial or by ridicule, to suppress it, especially on the part of those belonging to our own family. When he was a middle-aged man my father told me the alleged details, not vouching for them but just repeating the version which had been confided to him. I am getting pretty old myself, so I’m passing the tale on to you for what it’s worth—if it’s worth anything. I never tried to verify it—somehow didn’t seem to want to. If by any chance it’s true, then that iniquitous scoundrel, Santa Anna, was my renegade half-breed cousin and some of the blood that was in his veins is in yours. If it’s not true, and I’m reasonably convinced that it’s not in spite of so much circumstantial embroidery around it, then it’s mighty clever fiction.... Well, son, let’s be getting along, it’s six miles to supper.”

Except for some sketchy inquiries after I’d reached my majority, I made no effort to substantiate the underpinnings of this strange structure. I was afraid I might spoil a most dramatic product by disproving it. However, while I was at Frankfort in 1900 for a Louisville newspaper, covering the assassination of Governor Goebel, the political prototype of Huey Long—who had a career much like Goebel’s and died much the same sort of death that Goebel died—I did trace down an admission attributed to one very ancient, very fragile gentleman of the interesting name of Major Pat Major, a creaky but mentally spry connecting link with the past, who was quoted as saying that men he had known were in the mob which surrounded the tavern on that memorable occasion back in 1836, but went on to say that none of them would ever discuss the unexpected outcome of the affair or even admit they had information as to what privily might have occurred after they got there. In a history of certain Blue Grass counties I read that there was much confusion in the town on that evening and that after dark a disorderly and threatening assemblage, with torches and weapons, trooped up the hill to listen to an impassioned harangue by one John U. Waring, a violent-minded orator who subsequently died a violent death, but that it disbanded without offering any indignity to General Santa Anna—which would seem to give some faint color of plausibility to one phase of the account even though it offers no actual corroboration.

I have heard somewhere—but never sought confirmation for it—that contemporaneous Mexican authorities disagreed as to the exact date and place of Santa Anna’s birth; also that the Indians claimed he was all Spanish by descent and the Spaniards insisted he was all Indian. Moreover, I’ve been told that one biographer of the period intimated that in his youth Santa Anna attended the great French cavalry school at St. Cyr which, on the face of it, would seem to be a manifest error, while another historian contradicted this and significantly attributed the man’s admittedly expert military skill to the theory that he had been technically trained in a famous governmental institution in the United States.

So much for that. And seemingly there isn’t much more to be got by turning to West Point itself. At its beginning West Point had several false starts; was established, abandoned, re-established, then sadly languished. In 1802 it authentically was reopened—with ten cadets; but ten years later was without a single authorized instructor and students still were being admitted without regular appointment and with no sort of examination and at any age between twelve and thirty-four.

So if there be any trustful reader who offhand is inclined to accept the narration on the strength of this fragmentary fabric, I’ll advise that person to shake well before taking. As for me, I prefer to include it with such shadowy, speculative myths as the unbelievable one about the fate of the Lost Dauphin and the one about the escape of Marshal Ney from his executioners and the preposterous story that John Wilkes Booth was not shot down after he killed Lincoln, but hid away somewhere in the Southwest. Famous assassins are always escaping death to live out their lives under assumed names—take Jesse James and Billy the Kid. Eventually Johnnie Dillinger ought to turn up somewhere.

My grandfather died at eighty-two. You might say he died prematurely, because one of his brothers lived to be nearly a hundred, and two of his sisters were in their nineties when they passed on. But before day of a chilly December morning he got up out of a warm bed and in his nightshirt went forth, carrying an old derringer pistol, to deal with a rooster which, from under his window, insisted on crowing too shrilly for dawn and too frequently. He eliminated the rooster at one shot, but he caught pneumonia and that was the end of him.

The last I ever saw of him was when he had been “laid out,” as the saying went then, with his gaunt form stretched beneath the canopy of his great four-poster bed. Afterward, the craze for brass atrocities and gimcracky monstrosities laid its horrid grip on an aunt of mine who had inherited the furnishings of the old home place and that massive heirloom of solid rosewood disappeared. A long time later a local antique hunter reclaimed it. For two dollars it had been sold as junk by a secondhand dealer to an old negress in the county, but it was too big for her cabin so she used it for a roost in her chicken shed. It was covered inches deep with the accumulated droppings of years. I understand the present owner recently refused a considerable sum offered for it by an eastern collector.

[1]

Some sixty-odd years later, one of his sons-in-law, prowling through a secondhand shop at Cincinnati, found two quaint-looking tomes and bought them. When he got home and showed them to Dr. Saunders, as relics of a bygone time, the oldster grunted. “I’ve seen them before,” he said. “They were almost the first books I bound after I learned my trade at Lexington.” He took a scalpel and turned back the leather flap on an outer cover to show his rubric scored in the backing. I have both these copies in my library. They were written by the first Humphrey Marshall, a United States senator and a unique figure in border politics. He called his work The History of Kentucky. He devoted practically all of one volume to lambasting his enemies of whom there were a copious supply, and the other volume to proving that Kentucky was the site of the Garden of Eden—a conclusion with which few of his fellow Kentuckians quarreled then or thereafter.