Roughly from 1897 to 2012 Meshach hunted a nearly pristine wilderness that had never been settled by Indians, and would not become home to many whites. As the Indian frontier moved into the Ohio Valley, he stayed in the mountains and glades of the Appalachians hunting along a rugged expanse that had been worked by long hunters like Boone, but largely without dogs, [as far as my current evidence tells].

Boone had been preyed upon by small parties of Indians when he had done his long hunts but gave over his pelts and meat, knowing he could get more, in return for his safety. Meshach did not have to worry about Indians. Either with an assistant [cousin or in-law] or more often than not alone with his two dogs, Gunner and Watch, Meshach became a one-man ecological disaster, literally whipping out the remaining wolves, reducing the teaming bears and killing off the mountain lions, which he calls primarily panthers, with some referred to as catamounts.

The fights with the panthers were the most exciting and those with the bears brutal. Although Meshach had mastered the skill of loading while on the run, his hunts were pretty much single shot affairs in which the bear and panther almost always fought on after a fatal shot. As his dogs engaged the bigger predators in combat he would usually leap in with a knife and stab the animal. The buck deer gave some of the hardest fights, with his one relative, terrified of deer after being mauled by one, and going about armed with a deer-fighting club.

As far as servitude goes, the only mention of servile people are the occasional black man servant owned by wealthy men from the east, both Revolutionary War officers. It seems that after the Indian War phase, in the absence of land suitable for cash crops, and with slaves of little use in hunts, that plantation slavery of both sorts were left to the east and the south as the frontier quieted.

The bear hunting was simply horrific, with one bear breaking Watch’s haunches in a fight. To get the meet home Meshach had to leave the wounded dog in the forest after feeding it some bear liver. His wife was furious over her faithful hound being left in the wild, and then the next day it turned out the dog had crawled all the way home. Animals of rare size were seen for the last time by Meshach and his contemporaries, as overhunting began to shorten the lives of longer lived animals like bear and big cats. He mentions a huge bison found by the hunters that came before him.

Gunner was a bear-biting machine that would tangle with a panther with no hesitation. The dogs seemed to be part greyhound and part wolf hound and made a lot of noise once the hunt was on. The feats of the dogs in this memoir of storybook brutality are amazing, as was the athleticism of Meshach, in which we see something of what the Indian warrior must have been on the hunt, for Meshach had been killing animals in the woods since age 10, largely with improvised weapons.

The rugged outdoor life brought Meshach into occasional debility, but overall he was a picture of health. On one bear hunt he caught numerous bears feasting on autumn nuts, one so fat and full that he was dragging himself along eating nuts as he crawled. Other bears would eat so much and get so fat, that they would have to come out of their dens in winter to cool off and would then be taken by Meshach, whose one unnamed dog was so fierce, that after a bear pan-caked it and he left the wounded dog to assist the other dog in finishing off the bear, the dog with broken hind quarters crawled over to the dead bear and bit it!

Meshach declared that he would not own a dog that he would not risk his life in a fight for, even as the dog risked his life for Meshach. This is really the closest thing to a Tarzan story I’ve ever heard of in real life.

One thing is clear, in terms of the ecology, is that as long as Indian bands patrolled an area such slaughter as Meshach managed was not practical. But when the Indians could be pushed out of an area for a few years or more, the game they depended upon could be significantly reduced, even by only a handful of dog-assisted riflemen. I am interested in inquiring as to whether or not such highly effective canine combatants as Meshach used for his hunts could be practically employed by a lone man or two men in areas frequented by parties of hostile warriors too numerous to fight.

In this wilderness, unless a war was on, Indian parties ranged from 3 to 5 warriors, which had enabled men like Kenton and Wetzel to effectively fight alone by mastering the loading while on the run skill. But in the more open Rockies, dealing with larger parties of warriors who were mounted, what methods would a lone hunter or a small group of two or three use to hunt and remain undetected?

Could such dogs be trained to silence? I ask this because I did not find records of earlier frontiersmen along the Appalachians using dogs like this until the hostile Indians were cleared out.