EXPERIENCES OF A TRAPPER AND HUNTER 
FROM YOUTH TO OLD AGE 
By T. ALEXANDER 
CHAPTER II. 
J often met old long-jawed Tennessee and Kentucky hunters 
and trappers at my father’s distillery. Their attraction was a jug of 
the White Spring whiskey. They would stand around and drink and 
tell some very exciting stories of hunting and trapping, while I would 
stand spellbound, absorbing every word, until they got too drunk 
to be interesting. 
When those old pioneers would tell of their adventures, I would 
listen enraptured and dream of when I too could be a hunter and 
trapper. Words won’t express the feeling I had, the desire to be 
one of them. 
My parents sent me to the Athonem Female School at the time 
I wanted most to fight Indians, but I only stayed there one year when 
they concluded I was too rude to go to the female institution. I took 
part in a couple real boy fights in which Sam Shirley got his toe 
broke with a rock and George and Henry Dailey both had their heads 
bleeding from coming in contact with the same kind of missile. 
I was then sent to the old boy college which was managed by 
one Captain Murphy who had been through the Civil War and could 
command respect of all his soldiers and, naturally, was equal to the 
task of managing high strung, reckless boys. 
I liked the Captain very much because he was a real he-man. 
Several times he had to give me a thrashing for fighting or playing 
hookey, which were not uncommon occurrences with me. I played 
hookey sometimes to fish, sometimes tb build dead falls to catch 
animals. My mind was certainly never on books and I longed for 
the day that I would be released from such tomfoolery. 
One time especially I can remember, I had a string of dead falls 
on a small creek near home. As it was my job every morning to feed 
the horses, I would get up early, do my feeding and run to my dead 
falls. One morning I had no bait so I killed one of my mother’s 
chickens, tore it into pieces and took it to the creek to use for bait. 
As I neared my first dead fall I could observe a gray, lifeless object. 
I almost yelled in my excitement, positive that I had caught a coon. 
I hastened to take it from the trap and there it was, my mother’s 
old tom-cat, I took him by the tail, threw him in the creek and re- 
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