TRUE BELIVER

 

I  tell you, if you travel long enough down any philosophical path you always reach the land of ad nauseum. And, having reached this ever ever land one particular spiritual Puritan in Quaker garb,  Neal S. Dow - a five foot two inch Napoleon of Temperance, this two term Mayor of Portland, Maine, could never find his way back to sanity. Even the Rum Riot of 1855 failed to convince Mayor Dow that his own obsession had set the cause of sobriety in America back by a generation..

The first time Neal Dow (above) was elected Mayor was in April of 1851. He had been carried into office on his support of the new “Maine Law”, which made the sale of alcohol in the state illegal, except for medicinal and industrial uses. Wrote Neal, “Portland wharves groaned beneath the burden of West India rum.” Eighteen other states quickly followed Maine's moralistic lead. But as in all the other states, the new law was popular in Calvinist Maine only so long as it was easily avoided.

The most famous bootlegger became “Handsome Jim” James McGlinchy, who along with his three brothers, operated the Casco Brewery, after the original name for Portland. It and a few distilleries survived the Maine Law because, officially, they exported all of their product. But a good part of all that rum seeped back into Maine. 

Such leaks in his prohibition boat infuriated Mayor Dow (above), who was also president of the Temperance League. And after raids of every Irish “grog shop” in Portland failed to plug the local traffic in the demon rum, the Mayor insisted on searching all trains, boats and wagons entering the city. Since Portland was the primary rail and sea connection with Canada, the delays this created infuriated merchants up and down the eastern seaboard. Dow was even burned in effigy on Boston Common. And in April of 1852, when Mayor Dow came up for re-election, merchants from all over New England funded his opponent, Albion K. Parris. Mayor Dow lost re-election by 542 votes out of 3,300 cast.  That's a landslide.

Being a true believer (his maternal great-grandfather had the given name of “Hate-Evil”), the diminutive Mr. Dow could not believe the fault was his or his cause's . He was convinced he had been victimized by a conspiracy of merchants who provided fake I. D.s for the 2,200 Irish immigrants in Portland who had brought to America their strange Catholic religion and their vulgar sinful ways. Even worse, they almost all voted Democratic. Still at least the new Mayor Parris was also a temperance man, if not quite as enthusiastic an enforcer of the law.  

So “The Grand Pooh-bah of temperance” as the Irish nick-named him, retreated to his mansion at 714 Congress Street (above), to lick his wounds, and plan his comeback.

Under the theory that the only problem with his temperance law was that it was too weak, in 1853 Dow lobbied the state legislature in Augusta to doubled down. The new sterner temperance law they passed allowed a search warrant to be issued if three private citizens claimed liquor was present in an establishment. It also made the mere possession of alcohol proof of intention to sell. Thus every user was now a dealer. By now Dow was convinced the temperance movement was so strong...“The voters...will turn upon that point.” The little dictator even saw the growth of the Republican Party across the northern states not as primarily a condemnation of slavery, but as a rejection of alcohol.

In March of 1855 Maine passed two other pieces of legislation which Dow had come to see as essential for the eradication of liquor. First all immigrants must register and show their naturalization papers three months prior to election day. This disenfranchised hundreds of otherwise qualified voters for the approaching April elections, under the theory that what a local newspaper described as “Irish cattle” were also  “illegals” with false papers. The second law took care of most of the rest of Irish voter-wanna-be Americans. From now on, any voter rejected at the polls for whatever reason in Republican Maine, must appeal in Federal court. Cases here could take weeks just to get on the docket. The Democratic paper, the Eastern Argus put it best. “Dow...and company...have made up their minds to rule the state at all hazards.”

And they did. Dow was re-elected Mayor in April of 1855. But out of the 3,742 votes cast, Neal Dow's margin of victory was a mere 46 votes. Ignoring that sliming margin his close friend and political ally, Elder Peck, said it was “...a victory over Rum…Catholicism, and Corruption.” In his inaugural address, the zealot Mayor Dow warned, “I shall not fail... to employ all the power which the law has put into my hands.” He even suggested that his administration would “restrain the right of suffrage, now exercised by our foreign population...to prevent their overawing and controlling our elections, as they have done.” Mayor Dow had thrown down the gauntlet. And it would slap him right across the mouth.

As part of his new duties, Mayor Dow and the city council were supposed to jointly appoint a committee to pick a new liquor agent, whose job it would be to purchase liquor which would then be legally sold to the apothecaries and industries of the city. However Mayor Dow was so certain of his own nobility, he appointed himself to the selection committee, and to save even more time appointed himself the temporary liquor agent. As such he purchased $1,500 worth of alcohol (in his own name) and had it shipped to City Hall. Only after it arrived did he notify the city council. After all, who could question the morals of Mayor Dow?

The answer was the city council could. Their council members got into a shouting match with the Mayor over his actions. And one of them leaked details of the shipment to the Eastern Argus. On Saturday June 2, 1855 the paper printed up and posted handbills all over Portland, which laid out the facts, in particular that the liquor had been bought under the name of Neal Dow. The handbills then asked, “Where are our vigilant police... who think it their duty to...often push their search (of the poor man's cider) into private houses, contrary to every principle of just law? We call upon them by virtue of Neal Dow’s law to seize Neal Dow’s liquors and pour them into the street....Let the lash which Neal Dow has prepared for other backs be applied to his own when he deserves it.”

The timing could not have been worse for Mayor Dow. This was the four year anniversary of the original Maine Law. Three men found a judge who witnessed their testimony that there was illegal alcohol in City Hall, and he was thus required to issue a search warrant. A small crowd gathered at City Hall, mostly to see if the police were going to arrest Mayor Dow. They were not. But still the crowd stayed. 

As the day wore on, and the shifts at the locomotive plant and other factories let out, the crowd began to grow. By seven that evening there were 2,500 people milling around City Hall (above)), their anger fueled by what they saw as the hypocrisy of the biggest temperance man in the state having his own $1,500 stash of booze protected by the police. To avoid antagonizing the crowd the ten police officers locked themselves in the Liquor Room in City Hall, with the booze. Mayor Dow sent word to two “private” militia companies to come quick.

At least one member of the militia sensed the approaching disaster. But when Sargent William Winslip suggested the militia should load blanks, Mayor Dow responded, “We know what we are about sir. We’ve consulted the law, sir.” At that point Sargent Winslip dropped out of the militia. At ten that night one company of about twenty men, formed up in front of City Hall. Backed by armed troops, Mayor Dow ordered the crowd to disperse. The crowd responded with a hail of trash and garbage. Dow now ordered the troops to fire over the heads of the crowd. But their commander, Captain Green, said he needed more men. And for the only time that day Mayor Dow let a cooler head over-rule him.

It was a mistake. The sight of the twenty militia men retreating encouraged the crowd to surge forward. Rocks and bricks now replaced the garbage. One energetic fellow, a 22 year old sailor from Deer Isle named John Robbins, crawled through a broken window into the liquor room, unlocked the door, and the crowd stormed in.  At this moment the reinforced militia returned, and under Dow's command, opened fire. The uneven battle continued for twenty minutes. Only the fact the militia were armed with flintlock muskets prevented the death toll from being higher. John Robbins was killed, and seven others wounded. Eventually the crowd dispersed. To Republicans it was the Rum Riot. To Democrats it was the Portland Massacre.

Dow was charged with breaking the law he had helped pass, but he was acquitted after a one day trial for two reasons – first it was obvious the liquor was not really his, and second because the judge, Henry Carter, was a strong temperance man and a Dow supporter. Still, Mayor Dow learned nothing from the debacle. He immediately issued a “...Message on the Riot” which he blamed on un-named anti-temperance men, and claimed John Robbins was an Irish immigrant who was wanted by the law. But that charge fell apart when several witnesses under oath testified that John was a native American (i.e. born in America),  had never been arrested, was a mate on the barque Louisa Eaton and was a “steady, honest man, remarkable for his good nature and peaceable disposition.”  But whatever Robbins' disposition had been, it was suddenly clear the mob had been outraged at Mayor Dow's behavior and had not even been mostly Irish.

That fall the voters drove that point home by electing Democratic majorities to both houses of the state legislature, and the Governor's office, too. And quickly the Maine Law was overturned, ending Maine's five year experiment with prohibition. John Robbins was buried in the old Eastern Cemetery, with honors. Mayor Dow did not bother to even run for re-election. And even though prohibition was re-instated two years later, Neal Dow stayed out of that fight.

The new prohibition law was again rarely enforced. Thus it stayed on the books until the Federal government passed its own “noble experiment” in 1920. But long before then, in 1880, the bootlegger James McGlinchy had died, leaving behind an estate worth $200,000, marking him as one of the richest men in Portland., and proof that whatever people said in church, they were just people. 

As for the true believer Neal Dow (above),  he was lucky not to live long enough to see his dream produce what he feared most, the funding of organized crime, largely made up of foreign born and first generation immigrants (from lots of countries with different religions), who fed an increase in public drunkenness and alcohol addiction in response to the Great National Experiment in Prohibition. The Napoleon of Temperance died still blind to the truth of his folly in 1897 at the age of 93.

And if there is a lesson from the life of Neal Dow, it is that ad nausium is the land where all ideas, even good ones, go to die. Or, as Ben Franklin suggested, "moderation in all things - including moderation".

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MISTER SMILEY

 

I can't make my mind up about Schuyler Colfax (above). Was he a crooked, intriguing politician, as a wise man once said, or was he a working class hero who rose to the second highest office in the land by his own honest efforts? If it helps, Abraham Lincoln never trusted him. But, as the media types like to prattle, he had an appealing story. 

The smiler entered this world in New York City, heir to a prominent family name, but his father had died of tuberculosis five months before he was born. That made the newborn infant and his mother Evelyn, a burden on the family. 

In November of 1836 she married an ambitious widower, 24 year old George W. Mathews. The following summer Mathew's moved his new wife, his 11 year old stepson and his own daughter by train and canal boat to the the glacier-plowed flat lands of northern Indiana, along the Michigan border. 

Mathews opened a general store in the village of New Carlisle, but his real interest was politics. Three years later, in 1841, he was elected on the Whig Party ticket as auditor of St. Joseph County. 

So he moved the family again, to the county seat, at the south bend of the St. Joseph River - South Bend, Indiana (above). Fifteen year old Schuyler was hired as his stepfather's deputy.

At 19 the fair haired, soft blue eyed Schuyler and a partner pooled their resources to buy a failing weekly newspaper, which they renamed the “St. Joseph Valley Register”. In their premier editorial they declared their paper “shall be inflexibly Whig...On the issue of slavery we shall take the middle ground...we shall be fixedly opposed to enlarging the borders of slavery even one inch...and shall hail with happiness the day the Southern States shall...adopt a feasible plan for emancipation...”

They had just 250 subscribers, and ended the first year $1,400 in debt. But by 1844 they had made the paper such a success that Schuyler Colfax could afford to marry, and ten years later the teetotaler was elected to Congress, as a member of nascent Republican Party. He was just 31 years old.

In Congress they called the short Hoosier “Smiley” Schuyler (above), because of his ready grin and amiable nature. But there was a brain behind the benign smile and crude enunciation, and his ambition burned bright. Four years later, with his help, Republicans won control of the House of Representatives, and in 1860, the White House itself.  Schuyler expected to given a cabinet post, perhaps Postmaster General - he had chaired the postal committee in Congress. But he was told in a private conversation “Mr. Lincoln said...that with the troubles before us I could not be spared from Congress...” Instead Lincoln picked Caleb Smith, also from Indiana as Postmaster.  After this rebuff, Schuyler drew closer to the Radical Republicans, demanding immediate emancipation of all slaves.

In 1862, in a stunning midterm election upset, nervous Pennsylvania voters responded to the idea of four million slaves suddenly being freed by replacing radical Republican Speaker of the House Galusha Grow with the pro-union Democrat William Henry Miller. In Grow's absence, Schuyler campaigned to win the now vacant Speakership. And again Lincoln (above)  moved to block him, urging his political ally Montgomery Blair to campaign against Schuyler because he was “"a little intriguer...aspiring beyond his capacity, and not trustworthy” In one of Lincoln's few failures, the popular Schuyler easily won election as Speaker of the House, despite his Hoosier twang and lack of diction - he'd left public school when his family left New York.

His approach to being Speaker was described as “a slap-dash-knock-'em-down-auctioneer style.” He knew the rules of the House by heart, and used then to keep the government moving to support the war effort. He also helped to push through the transcontinental railroad funding bills, a matter close to Lincoln's heart, as before the war he'd been a lawyer defending the railroads. 

But Schuyler had also become a confidant of the humorless Radical Republican Secretary of the Treasury Salome P. Chase, who in the fall of 1862  tried to squeeze his rival, moderate William Seward, out of Lincoln's cabinet. Schuyler was not among the Congressional delegation which in December went to the White House to demand Lincoln fire Seward, and he was not there the next night when Lincoln confronted the conspirators, and forced Chase to retreat. But after this lesson in power politics, Schuyler tried to move closer to Lincoln.

When Schuyler's wife died in 1863, Lincoln attended her funeral. And after the crucial 1864 election was won, Schuyler assisted the President by helping to remove the thorn of Chase from his cabinet. He worked to convince the pompous Secretary to exchange his cabinet post for the robes of Chief Justice. And on 14 April, 1865, just before leaving for a tour of the California end of the transcontinental railroad, the Speaker met with the President. At that meeting Lincoln invited Shulyer to accompany him to the theater that night, but Schuyler begged off. And so Schuyler missed being an eyewitness at the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

It was Speaker Schuyler Colfax who oversaw passage of the Thirteen Amendment, abolishing slavery in the United States, and after the war, the 14th Amendment, which gave African Americans the right to vote.  Later he led the forces that impeached Lincoln's reluctant successor, President Andrew Johnson. The impeachment trial failed in the Senate by one vote. But two years later, Schuyler used that half victory to maneuver against 11 other candidates to win the nomination for Vice President, on the 11^th ballot alongside Presidential nominee Ulysses Simpson Grant. However that nasty victory left Schulyer with new enemies, and ensured that Grant would never trust him. Still Schuyler made history, because with his election that November he became the youngest Vice President in history, and also the first man to have presided over both the House of Representatives and the Senate. (In 1932 Texan John Nance Garner became the second.) 

Two weeks after the election, the widower Schuyler married again, this time to 34 year old Ellen M. Wade, niece of Ohio Senator Benjamin Wade. For a few weeks he was on top of the world. Then in January of 1869 Francis Adams Jr. broke the details of the Credit Mobilier scam in the magazine North American Review.

Before construction began in 1865, the men who sat on the board of the Union Pacific Railroad had created a  general contractor company called Credit Mobilier, and awarded them the contract to actually build the eastern end of the transcontinental line. They, of course, also sat on the board of Credit Mobilier. And they ensured that every bill Mobilier submitted, no matter how outrageous or inflated, was paid by the Union Pacific. Over the four years of construction, Credit Mobilier siphoned off every dime (and more) that a patriotic public paid for UP stock.

 By spreading Mobilier stock around congress, any obstructions were overcome, so that, in May of 1869, when the last rails were joined at Promontory Summit (above), the Union Pacific was $18 million in debt ($245 billion today). Meanwhile  everyone holding stock in the little known Credit Mobilier made out like bandits – one of whom was Schuyler Colfax.

When asked about stock dividends he had received from Mobilier, Schuyler (above, center, in his Odd Fellows robes)  insisted “I am an honest man...I never took anything that wasn't given to me.” It was probably the dumbest thing he ever said, so dumb, he may have never said it, but also so accurate, it stuck.  Shortly there after Grant privately urged his Vice-President to resign. Grant insisted he wanted to appoint Schuyler as Secretary of State . “In all my heart I hope you will say yes,” wrote Grant. But Schuyler knew that as Veep he could only be removed by a messy impeachment trial, while cabinet members could be simply fired, and he refused the offer.

However he did announce, just two years into his term, in September of 1870, that after almost two decades in Washington, “My ambition is all gratified and satisfied.” Luckily, so was his fortune. He had decided to retire from politics, he said. Schuyler didn't mean it of course, he was only 47 years old. But the announcement forced his critics to move onto criticizing somebody else. Then, as he had done in the past, as the next election approached, Schuyler announced that reluctantly, at the urging of his friends, he had decided to stand for re-election for “the old ticket”. Then he dropped a bombshell. Since the Credit Mobilier scandal had tainted the party, he suggested that maybe Grant should be replaced at the top of the ticket

Grant's response was what you might expect. He decided to replace Schuyler Colfax with Senator Henry Wilson, of Massachusetts (below) - known as the “Natick Cobbler”. 

It was an odd choice, since most people in Washington figured the shoemaker (above) was responsible for the defeat at the First Battle of Bull Run, because he had leaked Union battle plans to his mistress and Confederate spy, Rose Greenhow. But Wilson was a loyal radical Republican, and the Credit Mobilier scandal had already split the party, with newspaperman Horace Greeley running on the “Liberal Republican” ticket.

Determined to avoid an open floor fight at the Philadelphia convention (above), the internecine warfare went on in the backrooms, as Schulyer and Wilson supporters tried to out-promise and out-threaten each other. It was decided on the first ballot, sort of.  Schulyer received 308 ½ votes, and Wilson got 399. 

Immediately the Indiana delegation ask to change their vote, and quickly Wilson became the unanimous choice. The clever man from South Bend had been out flanked. Grant and Wilson won, and Schulyer was out, but not forgotten.

In January of 1873 Schulyer was called before a House committee, where under oath he denied receiving a $1,200 check for Credit Mobilier dividends. But the Committee had a bank deposit slip for that amount in Schulyer's own handwriting.  Democrats in the house voted to impeach the likable Colfax, but the Republicans saved his behind.  Still, he was, finally, done in Washington. The next year, when the stock market imploded, brought down in part by the failure of the Union Pacific railroad, a bankrupted investor was heard to complain, “It was all Schulyer Colfax's fault, damn him.”

So, not yet fifty, the orphan (above)  returned to South Bend, determined to rebuild his reputation. Where future generations of disgraced politicians would go on cable TV,  Schulyer Colfax went on the lecture circuit. Here his amiable and folksy veneer earned him generous speaking fees. And in the stories he told, old opponents became close intimates. He claimed that in 1864 Lincoln had confided his horror at the cost of war. “Why do we suffer reverses after reverses! Could we have avoided this terrible, bloody war!” his Lincoln said.  It might have happened that way, but the words seem far too melodramatic.

Schulyer made a good living, but the travel was exhausting. On Monday, 12 January, 1885, he left his home in South Bend, Indiana, to give a speech in tiny Rock Rapids, Iowa .  Schulyer took a train to Chicago, where he transferred to the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad.  At about ten the next morning he arrived at their station on Riverfront Street in Mankato, Minnesota (above). In the bitter cold he had to rush, dragging his luggage, three- fourths of a mile to the Union Pacific station on 4^th Street.

The problem was, it was -30 Fahrenheit (-34 Celsius), and it took him almost thirty minutes to make the bitter journey.  Five minutes after arriving at the station, he suffered “a fatal derangement of the heart's action”, and dropped dead.  Nobody knew who he was until they checked the papers in his pockets. Oh, how the mighty had fallen.  He was not yet 60 years old, and left his widow and only child an estate valued at $150,000 ($3.5 million today).

A newspaper man penned the ambitious Shulyer Colfax's best epitaph: “A beautiful smiler came in our midst, Too lively and fair to remain; They stretched him on racks till the soul of Colfax, Flapped up into Heaven again, May the fate of poor Schuyler warn men of a smiler, Who dividends gets on the brain!

- 30 -

COW HEARD

I guess if you are taking stock you might cow-culate Yvonne's escape as a dairying break for freedom. But I suspect it was simply inescapable that eventually some placid bovine was bound to have a random close en-cow-ter with a fence and win. So when electrifying freedom came to a six year old Gurnsey named Yvonne, northwest of the tiny German village of Zangberg, Bavaria, nobody should have had a cow. But having blundered away from the waiting room for the slaughterhouse this bovine broad proceeded to milk her brazen escape for all it was worth.

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Yvonne the German Cow: is away to sleep now in the nice forest, with a comfy bed made of old editions of Moos Of The World

Yvonne on Facebook

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Have you herd about Yvonne? She had her own FaceBook page and 24,000 friends. It was said she was born on April first of 2005,  in Austria, and was a productive member of the herd. But the humans who owned Yvonne were cheesed off and considered her moo-dy and spoilt. They were hoping she would ruminate on her mad cow ways, and had her artificially inseminated. 

But when muoo-udder-hood failed to make Yvonne cuddly, they leather go, selling the 'Problemkuh” (problem cow) in March of 2011 to a German farmer named Wolfgang (below). He explained to the magazine Bild, “She was a very nervous cow, so I sold her.” But first he fattened her up to about half a ton of beef steak.

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"Yvonnes parting words for this evening "Cow-nt your blessings every day".....I do }:-)~"

Yvonne on Facebook

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Three days past her sale-by date, on the afternoon of 24 May, 2011, as she was being loaded on a truck for her final round up, Yvonne did something for herself, if only by accident. 

She bull-ied her way through an 8,000 volt electric fence, and n-heifer looked back. Now, from a human perspective, what a cow lacks is the moo-ving insight that all cows are, beneath the hide, a band of udders. But that is not the whey of cows. And sadly, Yvonne was no cheese whiz. If there was a hidden truth laid bare here, Yvonne just sort of stepped in it.

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"Female cow, lost and lonely, seeks bull companion for romantic liaison and adventures. Great set of teats (128DDDD)"

Yvonne on Facebook

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Gone missing, Yvonne did not make it onto any milk cartons. Rather, she en-cow-tered a road, and everything in her experience told her to follow that concrete cow path of least resistance.  But outside of Hay-dom, roads have purposes unknown in the bovine ethos. And in following that road after dark, Yvonne was almost hit by a cop car (above).  In the police officers' view the great brown broad side flashed across their headlights in a flash, forcing them to swerve. In their view it was a blood curdling experience.  

In Yvonne's view, it was one more betrayal. Yvonne was suddenly a bovine Patty Herd-est, once the innocent victim, now the fleeing felon.  If she'd had a voice Yvonne might have echoed the average human twelve year old, forcing back tears and crying in the dark, “This is bull sh-t!” It was then that Yvonne left the road and made her own whey into the woods.

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Personal Interests: Escaping, chewing, breaking wind, hiding, moooooing.

Yvonne on Facebook

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The cops put out a contract on the grazy cow, labeling her a road hazard. Hunters were officially authorized to execute the leather covered speed bump, in the name of public safety. But Yvonne was saved by the wettest summer in recent years, which made cow hunting too damp to be sporting. And Yvonne fell in with a herd of deer who by example, began her transition from domesticated dumb beast to a curd-ish revolutionary, or as the Sueddeutsche Zeitung described her, a freedom fighter for “the animal-loving republic”.

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“We only hope for the best for the cow,”

'Mühldorf district spokeswoman

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Our free range heifer was now assisted by another freak of nature, a German Hindu vegan activist and publicity hound named Michael Aufhauser (above). Michael horned in on the situation by first buying Yvonne in absentia for six hundred Euros. That gave him standing in the Bavarian courts, allowing him to seek a sixty day injunction to stop the hunt – and, holy cow, it was granted. 

This wealthy vegetarian then sent a professional hunter out -  in his stocking feet (to avoid making too much noise) -  armed with a tranquilizing dart gun. Once doped up, Yvonne would be served up at “Gut Aiberbichl” or “Well Aiberbichl”, Michael's animal farm, where she would pasturize for the rest of her days in religious safety.

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I heard about that new “Planet of the Apes” film and was inspired. It’s hard wielding tools with hoofs, though.”

Yvonne on Facebook

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But Yvonne was a rare German burger indeed and had udder ideas. And she thought she was not well done by the humans. 

She was still drawn to humans, as proven by a local grand-moo-ther who spotted cow paddies in her backyard (above). A veterinarian who examined the fee-cow matter, dubbed Yvonne to be healthy. The magazine Bild now offered ten thousand euros for a peaceful end to the Great Escape.

And inspired by this capitalist approach, the grand-moo-ther's 11 year old grandson Sepp (above), went charging into the underbrush...

...getting close enough to snap a photo of the cow girl. (above)  

A few evenings later the hunter, Hans Wintersteller, came face to face with Yvonne. As detailed by Der Speigel, “She appeared out of the mist, and stared him straight in the eyes (above). She walked off before he could fire a dart at her. He reported that she now looks more like a buffalo than a cow, and had evidently turned into a wild animal in her months on the run.” How many buffaloes Hans has observed in Bavaria was not explained.

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"Yvonne knows exactly what she's doing, and she's tricking us.”

Michael Aufhauser

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Michael contacted a Swiss “psychic cow whisperer”, Franziska Matti, who remotely “spoke” with Yvonne, and was told “she was fine but didn't feel ready to come out of hiding,” Perhaps, growing frustrated with this bull-oni, Michael contacted the Swiss farmer who had raised Yvonne, and had bought her sister, Waltraud, and her calf Waldi (above).  Both were transported to Bavaria, and left spinning their veals ovenight in a forest pen.

The next morning hoof prints and some moo-cus indicated Yovonne had stopped by to say hay (above), but by dawn she had hoofed it back into the 3 ½ hectacre wood.

Then Michael steaked out the adora-bull Ernst, “the George Clooney of cattle” (above).  Michael was certain that Yvonne would be drawn to his “sonoroous baritone”.  But somehow Yvonne was tipped to Ernst actually being a Bull-dozer, having previously gotten the Ox and been fixed. Eventually this  un-tempting pseudo-Taurus was sent packing.

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“Looking to build herd, own the forest and relax on our comfy (non-leather) sofas together sharing cow lick and snacking on dairy nuts.”

Yvonne on Facebook

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During the August news drought, Michael sent in a helicopter armed with an infrared tracking device. They failed to find anything but more headlines. Finally, out of sheer exhaustion, the humans decided to try sanity. First, the hunter Hans Wintersteller announced, "We have asked all helpers to leave the forest.” Then Bavarian authorities permanently lifted the execution order. They e-mailed Der Speigel “As the animal no longer constitutes an acute threat to road traffic in its current location, no major search or capture operations are necessary. The Mühldorf district office requests that the animal not be disturbed in its current habitat.” Human logic seems to be, that starved for food, the press would moo-ve on to other stories.

But as August chewed its way into September, something changed for Yvonne. Maybe her dear friends the deer got ticked off at her. Maybe she wearied of being a maverick. Or, perhaps she thought, like Steve McQueen in "The Great Escape", that the last fence she jumped was a border to even more freedom. As you get older domesticity can feel like that. The Meuhldorf council suggested "she apparently go tired of the loneliness", and that may be closer to the truth. 

But whatever her moo-tivations, on the first of September Yvonne jumped another fence and rejoined a herd, this one of four calves. And perhaps the venison quartet reminded Yvonne of her own lost youth, when she still had calves and her breasts did not hang so udderly low. We will never know, since Yvonne was not talking.  

But we do know she had a beef with the veternarian who tranquilized (above)  her for her ride to her new home in a sanctuary. 

Maybe it was the cameras, and maybe it was his attitude. She knocked him on his butt. 

She had tasted freedom, and was not going to surrender it easily. No bullshit here. Yvonne objected to hands being placed on her.

She even charged the tractor sent to "tire" her out.

Eventually she was over powered. But she did not go gracefully in to that dark trailer.  But it was to be Yvonne's last stampede.

Eventually they had to drug the freedom fighter.  And she was passively dragged into the transport, and  taken to her new home, safe and sound and no longer free, but behind several fences. From this point forward, no Moos about Yvonne was good moos.

In her new home on a reservation, she lived the good life, surrounded by her calves and sister, a good, life. Domestic cows can live as long as 15 to 20 years. But Yvonne was no domestic beast. She had experienced freedom, and eaten a lot of things during her rebellious teenage years which were not good for her. She was euthanized at the age of 14, in September of 2019.  Moove along. Nothing to see here.

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You may e-mail your message to Yvonne, what heifer it may be, to pulltheudderone@Yvonnethecow.com

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