In 1812 as the U.S. declared war on Great Britain, ostensibly for the real crime of kidnapping and enslaving American sailors, but also so that they could grab Canada, Meshach, a man of note in his mountain district, was commissioned a sergeant, but was one of two and would have to serve as a private. Some leading citizens in the town of Port Selby talked him into staying for the next muster and serving as a captain. Having done this and selected his company, he noted that the antiwar crowd had selected a rival company and brought in an Irish bully from a road-cutting gang to whip him. What follows was an epic half-hour long fight between Meshach and three others against an entire platoon. Surviving a terrible beating and knocking around the enemy, Meshach and his friends prevailed, but he was crippled for three suffering years, forced to hunt sporadically, only work half days and try and mend his broken body, which he did deliberately through what seems a crude form of chiropractic self-treatment.

After three years of impoverishing debility he returned to his athletic hunting and was again the terror of big game in Western Maryland and West Virginia. Once he headed east with a load of meat and hide to Central Maryland and met his brother, who was running a gang of black slaves for a landowner. He found the central portion of Maryland barren of all game but rabbit and squirrel—a place that had been a mist-shrouded forest when he was born was now a hunted out farmland.

He found the east—especially Baltimore and Annapolis—surreal, and had no desire to spend any time in Baltimore for what seemed purely claustrophobic reasons. The crabs he ate were much bigger than modern Chesapeake Bay blue fin crabs. He took a ride on a new steamboat and was soon in a panic over the possibility of being taken from Annapolis to Baltimore. As a measure of his athletic ability it should be noted, that into early middle age and having suffered terrible injuries as a young man, he managed a 25 foot running long jump onto the dock, amazing the onlookers.

Meshach browning was an actual Tarzan like figure and was becoming increasingly out of sync with the wider world as it arced ahead and outward. He did not even feel right about discussing hunting with his brother and his friends as he thought they could scarcely believe the types of creatures he hunted and fought regularly. While discussing his embarrassment over missing the war due to listening to bad counsel, he stated emphatically that he believed in fighting for his country and had provided it with nearly a hundred male heirs to serve in its armies.

Nothing of white servitude is mentioned, suggesting that most of this burden had now fallen to blacks in Central and Western Maryland and West Virginia, areas that would prove impossible for the Confederacy to gain a foothold in the coming war, that was a mere two years off when Meshach completed his written remembrances in 1859.

Meshach Browning was a quintessentially American and largely un-warlike man, who served as the model of masculinity for his mountain neighbors. One can see in him the last generation of eastern whites to hunt in moccasins like their Indian forbearers and also a foreshadowing of rural riflemen such as Alvin York and Audie Murphy who would rise to the occasion of war as superb combat infantrymen.

At this very time, as Meshach returned to his mountain haunts to live out a uniquely sanguine type of private life, a six year old boy in New Jersey just might have been dreaming about a similar life of adventurous solitude for himself, or, perhaps he dreamed of other unknowable things. The man that would become known as Liver-Eater Johnson in another distant mountain range, as Meshach lived out his old age, was at the time of Meshach’s most productive hunting period born in New Jersey to a father of Scottish descent in 1822. Both men would come to their respective frontiers in the third wave, behind the explorers and exploiters, to test themselves against what was yet a wild land and live long enough to watch it pass into peaceful monotony.

Thank you, S.S. Sam for the loan of this remarkable story. I will have another copy with me when I go in search of the Liver-Eater with Ishmael and Shayne. The first half of Meshach’s life filled in a crucial gap in my research into Caucasian servitude in the young United States of America. Surely, the unadorned remembrances of his savage hunts will make for fine fireside reading while we go in search of a different kind of hunter.