Lou’s View – July 16, 2015
Stick to Your Guns
by Lou Bernard
So imagine you’re at work, just doing your job the way you always do, when suddenly you look down. You’ve found something you’ve never noticed at work before. And it’s a gun. Have you ever had one of those days?
I hope not. These days, that would be a complaint and investigation, a seriously unpleasant day for human resources, and probably six weeks of counseling and sensitivity training. Hell, just writing the first paragraph probably got me on three different government watch lists.
But it was considerably different a century ago. Back in 1908, that exact same incident was nothing more than an interesting day and a mention in the newspaper.
Hiram Button was from around North Bend. He was a big, tough lumberman, in spite of the fact that his name was straight out of a nursery rhyme. And in June of 1908, he was doing some work for Andrew Callahan, who had a lot of property in the Haneyville area.
Button was working pretty far out into the woods, especially considering that Haneyville itself is not exactly Times Square. The article reported that he was three miles from any civilization. So if you’re in an area that’s more remote than Haneyville, you’re probably in a place that’s not really easy to stumble upon by accident. We can safely assume that Button was pretty far from any local pay phones.
He was peeling bark from some of the local lumbering trees, removing the bark from the trunk. And, when he looked down, he found a gun. Or part of one, at least. The newspaper said that he found “the barrel of an old army musket with bayonet attached.”
This wound up on the front page—They had a funny idea about what constituted big news back then. It ran under the headline “Found An Old Musket In Out Of Way Place: Barrel Of Army Gun With Bayonet Unearthed By Bark Peeler.”
He picked it up—There was no explanation for it being there. No battle had ever been fought in the Haneyville area, and neither the Revolutionary nor the Civil War had gotten quite that far north. The Spanish-American War wasn’t even really in this country, and World War I hadn’t happened yet, making it an unlikely candidate.
So Button immediately began to look for the rest of the gun. Who doesn’t take an opportunity like this to get a free break from work?
“He made a diligent search for the remaining parts of the gun,” said the article,”But nothing more could be found. It is evident that it had reposed in the ground a number of years, as the screws, rings, and all of the stock could not be found and the barrel was warped out of shape.”
Button showed it to Callahan, who owned the land, but neither one of them could figure out where it had come from. Maybe a local veteran had been hunting in the woods and set it down, but they couldn’t figure out who that may have been. “How it came to be there in such an out of the way place is a mystery,” the article said.
Well, it may be a mystery that I can solve, or at least submit a plausible theory. Here I am trying to solve mysteries now because I still have to fill the column with about another two hundred words. The answer may have been James Haney.
James Haney is buried in the Haneyville Cemetery. He died on September 13, 1895, at the age of seventy, thirteen years before Button found the gun. And he was a Civil War veteran. Haney had fought with Company K, 8th Pennsylvania Volunteer Cavalry. He might have owned a musket like that.
And he very well might have taken it out hunting, after the war. Strolling along the forest, he could easily have set down the rifle, or propped it against a tree and forgotten about it. And walked off, back home, never to have seen it again.
And, decades later, Button could have come along and found that same gun.
Another mystery, another possible answer. It’s a plausible theory. More importantly, my column is now seven hundred words long, so I think I’ll stop searching now.
