The Mount Holly news. [volume] (Mount Holly, Burlington Co., N.J.) 1891-1942, 1899-02-28
TWO AGAINST A MOB.
AN OLD TIME MISSISSIPPI RIVER
SHOOTING SCRAPE.

SHOOTING SCRAPE.
A Trivial Incident That Led to the
Wrecking of the Old PostOffice, and
a Pitched Battle In Which Seven
Men Were Slain.
Zone of the worst shooting scrapes
that ever happened along the Missis-
sippi river" began the man at the
wheel, relaxing his hold on the tiller,
which had been hard down, and per-
hitting it to spin around with the
velocity of a top, took place out there,
just above the mouth of the bayou,
about 80 years ago, when they burned
the old postoffice and the warehouse.
You car see where they stood by the
piles of bricks there on the bank"
All admitted the ruins were plainly
visible, when he changed to the OPP
posite side of the wheel, and after a
spirited effort made to counterfeit the
effects of an impinging current that
had caused the boat to swerve from her
course he continued:
AAO OOoS phou 1 WoG OA AN o.
caught in the fog, and we tied up un-
der the point there about 8 o'clock in
the afternoon, and a lot of us went on
shore to take a little exercise. 1t was
on a Saturday, and a good many people
had come in from the country to do
their trading and get their mail. Some
of them were pitching quoits and others
shooting at a mark when we first land
ed, but they quit when they saw the
man carry the mail bag we had brought
and went in and stood around waiting
for the letters to be sorted. They had
all been drinking and were pretty noisy
When the postmaster said there were
only two letters and that they were
both for Bud johnson, a colored man,
a murmur of disapproval went around,
and several of them insisted on a new
deal.
"'You can look for yourselves, said
the postmaster, tossing them the bag,
but after searching and finding it empty
they were in a worse frame of mind
than aver Presently one Of the mum
Der, a local politician, got up and made
a speech derogatory to the administra-
tion. He insisted that the government
was prejudiced against white folks, and
that he had no use for the office any
how. Several of the others present ex
pressed their approval of this senti
ment, and a general smashing up of ev
erything at once followed During the
row the coal oil lamp was broken, the
house set on fire and everything burned
up.
Colonel Bunch, who owned the
property, noticing the fire, came up
from his plantation below and de-
nounced the perpetrators of the outrage
as vandals. The colonel was a high
spirited man and didn't stand any fool
ishness, but was getting along in years
now and couldn't do much but talk, so
that when one of the men declared he
could whip any Bunch on earth he
looked like he felt himself in a pretty
close place, but the colonel stood his
ground until at last, when the contend
ing parties were about to come to blows,
his son appeared upon the scene, and,
learning the cause of the trouble, sprang
between the two, and, drawing his re-
volver, said, My lame is Bunch, and
when my father gets to be too old to
defend himself | can stand in his tracks
and take his part.
"At this juncture the shooting com-
menced, and | made for the boat. Ev-
erybody seemed to take sides against
the Bunches, and You would have
thought them a band of guerrillas from
the way they kept the fight up. Pres
emily l noticed the colonel roll down
the bank and stop just at the edge of
the water, and then his son came stag
gering down, too, and fell near his side.
They were both deadl We wanted to
leave, but the men were afraid to go on
shore to unite the lines, for the infuri-
ated crowd was still calling for more
BuDches and the colored man who had
got the letters, but he had climbed a
tree, and they didn't know where he
was. An hour OF SO later, when the
crowd had dispersed, he slid down from
his hiding place, came aboard the boat
and we had him in the hold until we
got away and he was over his fright.
He said there were five men lying on
the bank that the Bunches had killed
before they fell"
The boat at this juncture showing a
disposition to become fractions, the
pilot gave his undivided attention for a
moment to the wheel, when he went on:
but there is not much shooting
along the river now. and you hardly
ever hear of a feud. When there were
only about three families in a county,
two of them were usually engaged in
an effort to exterminate the other on
account of some imaginary wrong, or
maybe prompted by jealousy. Since the
country has been settled up they are all
right. l used to think myself, " he went
on to say after a brief tussle with the
tiller, that what a man wanted was
room, but l have found out my mis-
take. What he stands most in need of
is plenty of good neighbors, and l find
that the thicker you put people the bet
ter they get along. 1t makes them more
human, and besides they come to know
something, which is not the case when
they live alone. 1 nave learned a good
deal myself by travelling around and
seeing what is in the world, for / usu-
ally go east every summer to swap
malarias. st. Louis Globe Democrat.