This passage from Rex Lardner is a gorgeous glimpse
into just how varied the combat scene was in the rough & tumble days of
America’s frontier growth.
“Americans
fought. They fought in saloons over party principles, religion, the favors of hostesses
and national origin. They fought over business on the decks of barges, riverboats,
flatboats, and canalboats. They fought for their lives in such bandit-ridden
areas as the Natchez Trail, San Francisco’s Barbary Coast and New York City’s
murderous Five Points and Bowery. They fought, for economic reasons, as
butcherboys, longshoremen and runners soliciting trade for immigrant boarding
houses (where there was intense competition for the privilege of fleecing
greenhorns); as truckmen, cabmen and hostler. They were more apt, however, to
use the tools of their trade than the naked fist. Rivermen afloat used
boathooks and belaying pins. The axeman used his axe or hobnailed boots.
Coopers used hammers; the woodsman, his double-edged, razor-sharp bowie knife;
the mule-skinner, his whip; the Irish canal-diggers, their pickhandles and
shovels. And if the contestants fought weaponless, they relied more on wrestling
holds, kicking and gouging than on the clenched fist, paying little attention to
the rules laid down by Broughton in 1743. In saloons they improvised weapons—the
leg of a chair, the chair itself or the jagged neck of a bottle smashed in
haste.”
The depth and breadth of applied violence is truly
staggering. We will continue to feature the historical aspects here on the blog,
and the tactical applications in the Rough & Tumble portion of the RAWSubscription service.
Down the road, observations on “fighting with chains”
and a South American tribe with a penchant for breaking arms and much more
mayhem to come.
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