History include (in addition to much paper) a heavy box of assorted steel
spurs for gamecocks. Resembling miniature sabers and daggers, such in-
struments were intended to slash arteries or penetrate hearts and lungs.
Poor and middling men had their chickens and betting circuits, too, con-
tinuing long past the criminalization of cockfighting in nearly all states.
Then there was gander-pulling, a rollicking contest that appalled north-
easterners and even some urban southerners in antebellum times. A. B.
Longstreet brought picaresque vividness to one event that took place on
a fringe of Augusta, Georgia, in . The organizer, a petty merchant, an-
nounced a venue strategically located between rival settlements and at-
tracted an eager crowd of participants and spectators. Here a small, circular
track ‘‘of about forty yards diameter’’ had been laid out. At one point along
the course, tall poles had been sunk into the ground on either side, ‘‘with
a strong cord’’ connecting overhead. From the center of the cord was sus-
pended a gander, its neck thoroughly slick with grease, ‘‘to vibrate in an arc
of four or five feet span, and so as to bring the breast of the gander within
barely easy reach of a man of middle stature upon a horse of common size.’’
Mounted competitors circled the track at a gallop, grabbing at the gander’s
slippery head as each passed between the poles. Longstreet doted upon the
quirks and physiques of both men and horses, the spectators’ cheering,
and the surprise conclusion. ‘‘Bostwick...broke the neck.’’ ‘‘Now Odum
must surely have it’’ (i.e., the gander’s detached head). ‘‘When lo! Fat John
Fulger had borne it away the second before.’’ Fat John dismounted, crowed
his victory, and taunted all his doubters, reaching into the merchant’s hat
to collect his cash prize. John quashed his own provocations, however, by
spending all his winnings on liquor for the crowd. He was, after all, as Long-
street reported, ‘‘really ‘a good-natured fellow.’ ’’^6
Bostwick, Odum, and Fulger, competitive and bibulous, were (to borrow
the title of a recent study of southern hunting culture) ‘‘bathed in blood.’’
And they represented the broad majority of white southerners, with their
convivial contests, their subsistence trapping and shooting, and yet more
gruesome, their part in the slaughters and extinctions that mastered nature
so that agriculture and towns might thrive in safety. They were elemental
to the Old South and the New. Even as market hunting nearly extinguished
white-tailed deer populations before the end of the eighteenth century,
settlers set out to exterminate large predators—wolves especially, but also
bears, panthers and other cats, and foxes. Cats and foxes were objects of
frolicking rituals pursued on horseback and on foot. Wolves were trapped
in baited pits and then shot or lanced to death, until they were unknown