THE FLIGHT OF MOSES MAY’S MAD COW (1865)
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The story you are about to read was composed from research conducted in the course of one of those investigations.
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Enjoy this old story about some Brooklyn cows getting loose outside of their normal environs – which, back in old Brooklyn, were quite often our city streets.
While doing house research, we found a colorful little story in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle of 1865. It involves two Germans and an Irishman, as well as a supporting cast of a number of primarily immigrant Brooklynites.
The story is led by a main character – a pretty “mad cow” – the kind with horns – that went rushing down Bushwick Avenue, having to be taken down by a “citizen,” whereupon it was delivered to a local slaughterhouse for gutting and the production of many sides of meat.
Although the article does not expressly state such – stories from this period were famously short on important details – it appears that the original owner lost his cow to a number of very hungry Bushwick pre-hipster citizens.
THE FLIGHT OF MAD BESSIE DOWN A VERY BUSY BUSHWICK
To set the scene, it all started at about 4 p.m. on Bushwick Avenue in the 16th Ward.
Mr. Moses May, a German immigrant of 136 Remsen Street, was driving a drove of cattle along the avenue, after a long day of their bovine grazing in a field, when suddenly, with no warning or general alert, one of his cows “became infuriated and rushed out of the drove towards a horse and wagon on one side of the street.”
This wagon was “the property of Peter Konig, residing at the corner of Flushing and Bushwick avenues.”
Konig, seeing the movements of the animal, did what any owner of property in Bushwick would do; he ran to save his horse and wagon from certain destruction, when, as inevitably happens in stories such as this, “the cow attacked him and inflicted severe injuries upon him.”
After thrashing Konig and his horses soundly, the poor girl then headed down Bushwick avenue, “using her horns in a fearful manner against anything opposing her.”
One can imagine the stir this image caused as the residents cleared the streets to a safe distance and others threw open their windows to watch what this unpredictable beast would do next.
Clearly, there were not many who wanted to challenge her, hoping that her industry would wear itself down and she would become as docile as doe in a meadow.
But there was one who thought otherwise – and it always only took one, didn’t it?
As the beast neared Wall’s rope-walk, a citizen across the street from the rope-maker tok matters into his own hands when he “stunned her with the blow of a blunt object,” after which she was “taken to a slaughter-house on the Johnson Street Plank Road, and there, after several blows from an axe, gave up the ghost.”
POSTSCRIPT
Meanwhile,” claimed the article, back at the initial scene of the crime, “an Irishman who had narrowly escaped being injured by the infuriated animal, approached the drover and had some words with Moses May.
Moses May, though, was obviously having a rough day, and cared little about the narrow escapes of a stranger when death and destruction, for which he would be certainly responsible, reigned in the wake of one of his errant cattle. Thus, he treated the Irishman rather callously, which may have been May’s final mistake of the day.
May, the paper detailed, responded “rather roughly.”
And it was at this point that “the son of Erin dashed his fist into his face.”
And the moral of the story is – when you’ve had a rough morning, have a drink in ainm Dé!
Erin go bragh!
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