Lou’s View – September 25, 2014
Just Horsing Around
by Lou Bernard
It’s like they didn’t have enough news back then.
To look at the old newspapers, you’d think they didn’t have much in the way of politics and crises. They insisted on running a lot of small, bizarre incidents. Odd things that happened to people. Nothing that you’d ever see in the paper today, but back then, they ran this stuff on the front page.
Not that I’m complaining. If they hadn’t, I’d have missed out on a lot of good columns. For instance, this one that happened on June 18, 1896 in Mill Hall.
The Clinton Democrat began,”A rather amusing event occurred at this place about 2:30 PM Thursday in which a number of Mill Hall’s most prominent citizens figured rather conspicuously.”
It began with a horse.
The horse belonged to a Mill Hall councilman named Dobler. Everyone rode horses in those days; cars hadn’t been invented yet. A horse took less gasoline than a car (even a Prius.) So horses were the primary mode of transport in those days.
A car, however, won’t lie down in the creek for no apparent reason, which is pretty much exactly what this horse did.
“Councilman Dobler is in the habit of pasturing his horse on the island near Garth & Co.’s Store,” the article said. This would most likely have been along present-day Route 64, where the Garth family was involved in making axes, and the island still sits in Fishing Creek. “Yesterday the animal went into the creek and while in the stream took cramp in the stomach and laid down in the water. Numerous efforts were made to get the animal out of its critical position, but with no success.”
Your options are somewhat limited in that situation. You can’t just hang around and hope the horse grows gills. You basically have to help him get out of the water, probably while pondering that fact that this never happened to the Lone Ranger.
So, the option they chose instead was to re-enact a scene from a Three Stooges film.
Someone found a rope. They decided to tie it around the horse’s body, and attempt to drag him out of the creek to safety. (This is another one of those columns that I hope PETA never reads.)
If my father read my articles, he might recognize this as essentially the same plan I came up with at about age ten, when I got his tractor stuck in a swamp and didn’t want to explain how. With, as it turns out, more or less the same end result.
The Democrat, which has never used one word when fifty would do, said,”The herculean powers of the individuals at the other end of the rope, however, it appears were too much for the rope, and about the time that all were pulling in dead earnest….” If I keep typing that sentence, you’ll be reading this article for the rest of the week. I can sum it up: The rope broke.
Same thing that happened with me and the tractor, except I was maybe ten at the time.
The rope snapped, and dumped all of the men on the ground. The newspaper didn’t publish any of their names, except for Councilman Dobler, and I’m assuming that was by their own request. Nobody wants to be known for falling over like a domino.
The heaviest of the men, who topped out at about 240 pounds, went down the hardest, and hit his head on the ground, knocking himself cold for a few minutes. The others were more or less unharmed, except for their pride.
Which took another hit a moment later, when the horse got up and strolled casually out of the creek all by itself.
Problem solved, I guess.
And then they went on to discuss some of the men who had recently lost feet and eyes while working at the local mill. Somehow, that was less important than the horse thing, apparently. That was the Clinton Democrat: All the news that’s fit to print, plus a whole lot that wasn’t.
