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Show As I Remember Them Ed. C. Marshall i H By C. C. Goodwin ' t tB was of the old Virginia and Kentucky H l "KH Marshall stock, the brother of the famous H John Marshall of Kentucky. He was six H ' feet two inches, I think, in height, straight as H he was tall; a leonine head on square shoulders, H dark gray eyes, and hair and whiskers inclined H to auburn; a natural orator and the most ver- H I satile genius that ever took an audience captive H and swayed it as he willed. 1 had the honor to H Jj know him well. He and one very dear to mo H f crossed the plains by the southern route in '49, H and we lived dn the same town many years. On H that route across the continent, the company H was chased for seven days by Apaches. H One mid-day they made camp under a high H reef of rocks to take their luncheon. ' H Marshall ate his hardtack and drank his coffee, H . and then strolled leisurely up to the top of this H reef. Suddenly a hundred shots from the sav- H ! ages smote the reef. Marshall without hurrying !' his pace came down, but when ho reached a safe place in camp he burst out into a torrent of expletives, ex-pletives, winding up with the words, "If there is I,1 any gentleman in this company, who has the H' conceit to believe that an Apache can't shoot, H let him go up on those rocks for a few minutes." I, But none of them seemed to have any doubts. H On the stump he was all encompassing in his Hj fun, his pathos and wonderful eloquence. He H was a candidate for the senate in 1854. Governor W Weller had issued an address in which he over- !'did the business of praising the Irish and Germans, Ger-mans, who had so gallantly fought for their adopted ad-opted country in the Mexican war. Marshall made a speech a few evenings later. I recall from m memory a paragraph of that speech as follows: "Old man Weller has told you of the devoted patriotism of the Irish and German soldiers that went out of love for their adopted country, to help fight her battles on foreign soil. Don't you believe it, fellow citizens. Wener does not know. I do. They fought all right enough, but they went there just as I did, for I was there. I have a long scar to identify myself, that I got theie. I was young, somewhat foolish. I liked adver-ture. adver-ture. I heard theie was going to be a war and all my life I had been wondering how it would seem to be in a real battle, so I went. I found out; but let me tell you something. The man, who in that company, under that flag, with drums rolling, bugles calling, and the big guns beginning to roar; the man, who in that place would not have been eager to take a hand, would not have been fit to have had old Fritz for a grandfather or a genuine Irish lady for a mothe: John Bigler was candidate for Governor and Marshall went over the state debating the issues is-sues with him. Governor Bigler was a short unc very corpulent man. They made a tour of the mountain camps, when on their return to tho valley they held a meeting at Marysville. In the course of his speech, Marshall said: "You would not think it, but my friend Bigler is the toughest formation that ever an opponent tried to debate solemn, political issues with. I never realized his charm until one morning in a mining camp, I arose at dawn and started out for a walk. I found the Governor out ahead of me. He was going from store to store. In every place he was first struck by the wonderful quality of goods the merchant exposed for sale. He had seen nothing of their quality in any of the stores in the lower cities. Then, tho eulogy over, he was most glad to find such goods, for he wanted to purchase a pair of trousers, and he knew there was not a pair of pantaloons in all the mountains of California that would come within sixteen Inches of going around him." He had been in congress the previous year. I recall a iew words of a speech he made recounting recount-ing his experience. It ran like this: "You find queer old chaps in Congress. Hair thin on the r tops of their heads; their calves all shrunken; they do not crack a joke once a month, but when they do, it is a rib roaster. You know I told you if I got to congress, I would introduce a Pacific Pa-cific railroad bill that would make them sit up and lake notice. Well I fixed the bill and introduced intro-duced it, and after a while, was given a chance to discuss it. I was getting along fine. My inner consciousness was telegraphing "up to my brain that this was bound to be a winner, when an old chap with a cracked voice interrupted with the words, "Mr. Speaker, may I ask the gentleman where he is going to locate his road?" "Now," continued Marshall, "I am no civil engineer, if w I build the intellectual part of a road, is not that enough for one man to do? Why require the purely material part and demand of me my grades and curves as though I was a county surveyor?" sur-veyor?" All that summer Marshall made his campaign insisting that this scramble for office was disgraceful, dis-graceful, that the office should seek the man. But when the legislature met, Marshall was in full evidence on the streets of Sacramento. A friend approached him and said, "Mr. Marshall, I thought it was your theory that the office should seek the man." "Certainly it is," was the quick reply, "but suppose the office is out looking for him, is it anything more. than common courtesy for him to be where he can be found?" When the great war became imminent, Marshall Marsh-all drifted back to Kentucky. After the war he was a candidate for congress against Hon. Luke Black- . burn. They went over the state in joint debate. Marshall sought to get Blackburn to discuss the tariff question with him. Finally Blackburn did discuss it for a few minutes in glittering generalities. generali-ties. In reply, Marshall said, "You heard my friend on the tariff. He reminded me of a beautiful beau-tiful swan sailing on a placid lake; her plumage stainless as snow; singing as she sails, absolutely absolute-ly serene in her selfconsciousness, exquisite in her song, drawing about half an inch of water and totally unconscious of the unfathomable depths beneath her." Later in life he returned to California and made the most terrible arraignment of a lordly culprit in a San Francisco court ever heard in that state. But when his emotions were awakened awak-ened and the theme was worthy of him, it was an enchantment to listen to him. Hear this of the Calif ornian Pioneers: "They were able to win the greatest of all triumphs, the victory over themselves; they were able to preserve order without law; to maintain main-tain justice without tribunals; their possession of absolute independence never degenera'ed into selfishness, nor the almost savage liberty of a country without law, into cruelty or oppression. "Shall we, who, in conscious fulfillment of a great mission, brought method out of chaos, and cultivated the flowers of justice and safety in the soil of anarchy yield to lesser dangers and baser temptations? Shall we soil the splendor of the past?" |
