My great grandfather Charlie McCabe was a businessman. Not especially successful, but a businessman just the same. When he came to America as a boy of twelve and was sent to log in Maine in the winter, he vowed that he would find a better way to make a living, and all his life he tried his hand at business....a stationery store, a candy story, bartering and selling cows and horses and milk and butter. None of these ventures made him any money, but he did have a few successes. One of these involved mules, dynamite and cats.
When Charlie was in The Dalles one winter in the early 1870's, he got word that the town of Boise was suffering from a plague of mice and rats. Prospectors coming in from the Idaho mountains brought stories of grain devoured and children being bitten in their beds, and the people of Boise were wringing their hands because they hadn't the cats to catch the rats. And, the prospectors of the area needed dynamite as well.
So, Charlie packed up 25 mules with a cat slung in a bag on the right and left of each mule's pack. The cat bags had gathered tops, so the unhappy cats were kept in place along with the sticks of dynamite gathered in the mule's middle pack. Charlie also brought along cat food....smoked salmon, jerky and the like....and some sort of leather leashes for walking the cats during the evening campouts. It must have been a noisy affair, miserable cats, restive mules and Charlie singing Irish ballads (he was high spirited and like his descendants, given to the drink) as they scrambled along the high reaches above the Columbia River.
He arrived in Boise in about a week and a half, his pack train intact...... with the exception of one unfortunate mule and two cats. On the third day of traveling, one mule made a stumble and fell off a high cliff into the rocks far below and blew up dynamite, mule, and the cats in an impressive boom that echoed up and down the Columbia. After Charlie counted his losses, I assume he sobered up and picked his way to Boise with more circumspection.
The pack train arrived in Boise without more incident, and people were thrilled with the cats. They paid him five bucks apiece for the cats, a fortune in those days. I assume Charlie also got rid of the dynamite and loaded up his mules with something from Boise for the return trip to the port below The Dalles. Then he came back to Pomeroy with his money and started another business and fathered another child. My own grandad was the oldest of Charlie's five children.
To this day, my father said, the cats of Boise remain, by and large, the descendants of Charlie McCabe's cats.
Hee hee hee, hoo hoo hoo! Oh, what a fabulous story. Not only are you gifted at telling stories through your art, you are gifted at writing them as well.
Posted by: Lucinda | November 01, 2008 at 09:31 AM