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.
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