1861 CIVIL WAR CONFEDERATE BROADSIDE BEN McCULLOCH TEXAS RANGER LINCOLN SCALPING
Marshal, Indian fighter, and Sacramento sheriff. The "song" is all praise for McCulloch, he's the fellow who will "scatter all the Lincoln nests" and who "comes upon his foes like red hot brick bats/He takes off their scalps like so many wild cats" and He'll work day and night to set the South free sir. Brings to mind Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece Blood Meridian. Broadside measures about 5 x 10 inches, framed up nicely, frame measures about 7.5 x 12 inches.
Clean - shadows in photographs are of photographer. The song was supposedly written sometime between the beginning of the Civil War and McCulloch's death at the Battle of Pea Ridge in Arkansas, March 7, 1862. Benjamin McCulloch arrived in Texas in 1835 following his pal and fellow Tennessean David Crockett but he got laid up with a case of measles in Nacogdoches. Crockett and company were killed at the Alamo two months later but McCulloch went on to play a crucial role in Texas history.
He joined the Texan army under Sam Houston, commanded one of the Twin Sisters in the Battle of San Jacinto, became a Texas Ranger, participated in the Battle of Monterrey, served as General Zachary Taylor's army chief of scouts during the Mexican War, and scouted the western frontier prior to the outbreak of the Civil War in which he became a brigadier general appointed by Jefferson Davis, commanding troops at the battles of Wilson's Creek and Pea Ridge, where his luck ran dry and he was shot to death by a Union sharpshooter. Not all Texas though - in 1849 McCulloch went out to California to join the Gold Rush, he did not strike it rich but ended up being elected sheriff of Sacramento. Quite a rarity - copies located at the New-York Historical Society; Library of Congress; and Wake Forest University. Oh have you heard of the brave old fellow, He goes by the name of Ben McCullough, He fills his foes with consternation, He's the pride of all the Southern nation. Oh dear, oh'tis truth what I tell,'Mid fire and powder he loves to dwell. He's the man above all the rest, sirs, That scatters all the Lincoln nests, sirs, That makes them fly at the smell of powder, That uses them up like old fish chowder. The Kentucky boys he's got to back him, The Iowa boys will fail to crack him, The Illinois crew he'll beat all hollow, Be quick Indiana, if him you want to follow. He comes upon his foes like red hot brick bats, He takes off their scalps like so many wild cats, Anthony Wayne is no circumstance to him, Though many of his foes do strive to undo him. Huzza for McCullough the brave rifle ranger, The friend of truth-to vice a stranger, He's a hard old knot of the hickory tree, sir, He'll work night and day to set the South free sir.