Rensselaer Republican, Volume 26, Number 28, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 March 1894 — HOOSIER EAGLES. [ARTICLE]

HOOSIER EAGLES.

Talcs of Aquiline Struggles and Discomfitures In. a Great State. New York Sun. “The Indiana eagles are on the rampage again,” said George Bloshfield of Wayne county, “and seem to have taken a particular fancy this time to small hoys. It isn’t so long ago since the Sun printed the story about the big Vermillion county eagle that swooped down on a ‘ flock of geese in a farmer’s door yard, confidently expecting that it would be no job at all to soar back with a fat goose for dinner, and was almost knocked silly with surprise when the whole flock pitched into him Witli a vim that compelled him to do some of the liveliest fighting he had ever run up against; and even then, after licking every one of the geese, the eagle failed to get one of them for his dinner, because the farmer’s daughter came out and went at him with a fence rail and a dog and laid him so low that he never got any higher than the farmer’s mantelpiece, and then only as a stuffed eagle. “That story was all right, but indirectly it gave out the idea, somehow, tfiat all the eagles in Indiana were in Vermillion county. Not by a long shot! Old Scott’s all right when it comes to eagles! Vermillion county may have a few more eagles than Scott county, but it takes two or three Vermillion county eagles to size up with one of Scott’s. Mrs. Farmer Rickards can tell you that. She lived in Vermillion county when she was a girl, and once killed an eagle there that came down and tackled a turkey gobbler in her father’s barnyard. She killed it with a flail with which she was threshing out oats in the barn. That eagle pleasured six feet and a little over from tip to tip. It was considered a fair average Vermilion county eagle. Mrs. Farmer Rickards now lives in Scott county. Some time ago, when the weather was warm, Mrs. Rickards was out in the yard boiling soap. Her three-year-old boy was playing about the yard. Suddenly a

shadow like that of a passing cloud came over the yard and Mrs. Rickards heard a scream. She looked up and saw a heap of feathers as big as if one of her biggest feather beds had been dumped down there, but from the top of it rose the head and from the bottom of it were thrust the feet of an eagle. The feet were clutched in the clothes of Mrs. Rickard’s three-year-old boy, who was kicking and" squirming and yelling to beat the band. Mrs. Rickards had a large ladle in her hand. She dipped it in the kettle of soap, filled it with the boiling stuff and sprinted across the yard only too quick. The eagle had "got his hooks in on the boy all right by this time and was rising easily with the youngster. But lie had tarried too long. Mrs. Rickards dumped the ladle of boiling soap on top of his head and the hot stuff ran down and filled his eyes and nostrils jam full. The eagle dropped the boy as if he had been hotter than the soap and began doing some of the livliest ground and lofty tumbling around that yard that was ever seen. The soap hadn't only blinded him; it was getting in its little alkali workon those sensitive organs in a way that simply crazed. “Mrs. Rickards grabbed her boy and ran with him into the house. Then she got her husband’s old army musket and ran back to use it on the eagle, which was still pirouetting around the yard like a rooster with its head off. The gun wouldn’t go off, so Mrs. Rickardß clubbed it and pounded that blinded and crazed eaglo over the head until he was glad to die. He was undoubtely a patriarch of the sky, for every feather on him was as gray as the lichen on glacial rocks, and he measured seven feet from tip to tip. “These are all the returns that were in when I left home, but I expect latet* news of Indiana eagles when I get back, for they are on one of their periodical rampages.”