Daniel Ellis described my cousin William Sparks as a stampeder, so I used Amazon "Look Inside" as a concordance to look up occurrences elsewhere in his book. Amazon has a different edition than mine (different pagination), and mine online did not allow searches. But thank you, Amazon. I got 2 dozen or so occurrences and looked at them early this morning. Usage started in the 30s (1830s) with the word stampede italicized to indicate that it was more or less foreign. In 1842 the Hartford Courant printed this:
A STAMPEDE.-- The Picayune, in one of its sketches of the Santa Fe Expedition, gives the following account of a Stampede, which means, we suppose, a drove of scared horses" . . . .
By 1861, Ellis used it somewhat ironically to refer to the bands of northern sympathizers he escorted through the mountains to Union lines. They did not go very fast, but he pretty much kept them rounded up together. The particular stampeders at Limestone Cove in November 1863 were a group from the Union sympathizing Wilkes County, NC, where one of the Sparks cousins chaired a Peace Meeting. Two of the young Sparks men were in this stampede which was attacked by a remarkably brutal rebel colonel, Vincent Witcher, who delighted in dashing brains out, actually dashing brains out, among which were the brains of my 20 year old cousin John Sparks. His brother William survived, with damage from breathing smoke and from witnessing horrors so awful that my Cousin Fred Slimp who wrote much of the 13th Regiment history simply would not write them down. A lot of cousins who were not kin to each other, at that place. Small world, or especially ornery people?
I set out three or four days ago to find another family story and found this . . . .
A STAMPEDE.-- The Picayune, in one of its sketches of the Santa Fe Expedition, gives the following account of a Stampede, which means, we suppose, a drove of scared horses" . . . .
By 1861, Ellis used it somewhat ironically to refer to the bands of northern sympathizers he escorted through the mountains to Union lines. They did not go very fast, but he pretty much kept them rounded up together. The particular stampeders at Limestone Cove in November 1863 were a group from the Union sympathizing Wilkes County, NC, where one of the Sparks cousins chaired a Peace Meeting. Two of the young Sparks men were in this stampede which was attacked by a remarkably brutal rebel colonel, Vincent Witcher, who delighted in dashing brains out, actually dashing brains out, among which were the brains of my 20 year old cousin John Sparks. His brother William survived, with damage from breathing smoke and from witnessing horrors so awful that my Cousin Fred Slimp who wrote much of the 13th Regiment history simply would not write them down. A lot of cousins who were not kin to each other, at that place. Small world, or especially ornery people?
I set out three or four days ago to find another family story and found this . . . .
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