Perrysburg journal. (Perrysburg, Wood Co., O. [Ohio]) 186?-1965, 1879-09-19
The Chisholm outrage.

~ anu lOTTlDly uTdIuuJlC Us UnB SUOTy OF
Mrs. Chisholm, given in another col
umn. Whether examined as whole
or in detail, it stands alone in its horri-
BILE and unequaled interest.
The narration commences easily, and
rises smoothly and without effort to its
thrilling climax. The wife and mother
was at home; the husband abroad on
business. There is little touch here
which reveals the quiet home life; it is
gentle prelude to the stormy instru-
mentation which is so soon to follow.
There is the glimpse of the quiet home,
as yet unbroken, and then the theme
becomes a little disturbed. She has
just come in from some visits to her
neighbors, and she has heard some ru-
mors of trouble. And the theme be-
comes still more menacing as she looks
through her windows and sees strange
men in unusual numbers lounging by,
or lowering about, the while glancing
at the house with angry looks. And
now the gentle prelude has given way
to strains, as yet not warlike, but full of
menace, of portentous threatenings. 1t
is something like the moaning of the
winds beneath broken sky, betoken-
ing an approaching storm.
The scene gradually shifts from the
quiet home through scenes of increas-
ing turbulence to the county Jail. Dur
ing this change the yard becomes filled
with scowling men; they throng the
halls and stairways of the house, they
brandish their guns; and thus the scene
grows stormier and stormier until it
opens in full strength in the jail build
ing. Here, at once, the menaces, the
angry portents, begin to hatch into re-
ality. The strains become clamorous,
become filled with direst passions and
fiercest actions. The father, daughter,
and a son have been hurried into the
jail and locked up in one of the cells to
preserve them from the fury of the
breaking storm. Following a little
later, the mother attempts to reach her
husband and children. The stairway
up which she must go is thronged with
infuriate fiends, through whom she
cleaves her way with desperate energy.
At the topis the cell she labors for; and
against its door men are hewing with
axes. Other men, or demons, rather,
place the muzzles of their guns within
the CRATES of the wall, and fire at ran
dom upon the defenseless trio within.
And just here there is pathetic inter-
lude; she who has fought like an eG-
ragged tigress to reach her attacked
young is overpowered, and sinks for IN
| instant into the woman, the wife, the
mother. With piteous accents she ap-
peals to the fends about her, and de-
mands of them in the sacred name of
husbands and fathers that they spare
her husband and her children. 1t is
vain! AS we'll the writhing fawn may
claim mercy from the wolf whose hun
cry fangs are already Redeemed with
its blood; and, seeing this, she at once
becomes a supreme embodiment of res
olution and defiance. She hears cry
from her husband, and she fears for a
moment that his soul has quailed be-
fore the horrors which confront him.
| What ordinary nature at such a mo-
ment would stop to think whether cry
uttered under such circumstances was
one of cowardly apprehension? She
wished no quailing at that moment
With the air full of kissing death, she
rose to the grandeur of hoping that her
husband, defenseless, at bay, face to
face with certain death, should meet
! his doom wlthoue culver of weakness
or q cry of mercy to the bloody hell
hounds who were shooting him to
death.
She gains entrance to his cell; and
Johnnie is dead. His clothing is on
| fire, and dipping her hand in his IOeIIi7lg
blood she eTtt1gutSheS the burning mass
Was there ever anything more fearfully
dramatic than this picture of mother
bending over her son and using his life
blood to save him from mutilationP
And even here, with a savage hell
roaring about, and scorching them with
its flames, the sister finds space to con-
vey, and the mother to hear, the sweet
assurance that Johnnie had died with
out pain. 1t may be supposed that, for
a brief second, the motherly heart
thrilled with sad, albeit supreme, salts
faction at the thought that her boy had
passed away without the agony and tor
ture of lingering death. 1t may be
supposed that woman who, among
the roar of guns, the shouts of assas-
sins, and the knowledge that she stood
in the actual presence of death, had
leisure to fear that her husband might
be weakening before his murderers;
who, amidst the storm of buckshot,
could stoop to wet out with his blood
the smoking garments of her boy; who
could, in the midst of such indescriba-
BILE horrors, gain moment in which to
entertain the comforting thought that
he died without pain; it may be sup
posed that such woman, enveloped in
the smoke of belching guns and in the
presence of the grandest catastrophes,
found even moment as she gazed into
the dead face for swift retrospective
glance which took in the travail of his
birth, his beautiful infancy, and the
swelling hopes which accompanied him
in his approach to manhood.
And again the scene changes. Meet
ing unexpected resistance in their eff
forts at murder, the cowardly hyenas
skunk down the stairway, and resolved
upon fire as a safer means of butchery.
The husband, wife and daughter follow
down the stairway, preferring to face
the hail of buckshOt rather than to re-
main and chance the horrors of fire.
Again another dramatic incident. A
gun is thrust full at the breast of CHS
holm, when the daughter filings her
arms about her fathers neck, and in
terposes her body before the muzzle OF
the assassin's gun. He fires all the
, same, filling her body with pellets,
"And her arm was shattered" says the
, mother, after enumerating the wounds
! "for 1 heard the rattle of the bones
when l tied up the wound with my
handkerchief. Her face was streaming
with blood" A little later the
| daughter, with her face streaming witt
/ blood, her arm shattered so that the
bones ratified, and other wounds al
, over her person, goes TO the door t.
t plead for help for her dying father
"and them" says the mother, "som'
. one shot her in the leg, and she raj
: back and told me of itP' All, chival
.