Company Aytch

This trip will combine the favorite hobbies of several of our members:  history, literature, and malacology.

You already knew that the Duck River is the "most biologically diverse river in all of North America" and "surpasses that of all European rivers combined" in aquatic diversity of species.  This is primarily because of the freshwater mussels, which Josh has been collecting and displaying at the RRCC headquarters.

He's got the Tennessee Pigtoe, the Pink Heelsplitter and the Cumberland Monkeyface,  but we will be on the lookout for the Pale Lilliput mussel which was just reintroduced a few years ago after being on the endangered species list.

It is possible that Private Sam Watkins tried to cook and eat a Pale Lilliput when he was camped along the Duck River with the First Tennessee Regiment of the Army of Tennessee in 1863.

He wrote about it in his Civil War memoir called "Company Aytch - Or a Side Show of the Big Show."

Reader, did you ever eat a mussel?  Well, we did, at Shelbyville.  We were camped right upon the bank of Duck River, and one day Fred Dornin, Ed Voss, Andy Wilson and I went in the river mussel hunting.  Every one of us had a meal sack.  We would feel down with our feet until we felt a mussel and then dive for it   We soon filled our sacks with mussels in their shells.  When we got to camp we cracked the shells and took out the mussels.  We tried frying them, but the longer they fried the tougher they got.  They were a little too large to swallow whole.  Then we stewed them, and after a while we boiled them, and then we baked them, but every flank movement we would make on those mussels the more invulnerable they would get.  We tried cutting them up with a hatchet, but they were so slick and tough the hatchet would not cut them.  Well, we cooked them, and buttered them, and salted them, and peppered them, and battered them.  They looked good, and smelt good, and tasted good; at least the fixings we put on them did, and we ate the mussels.  I went to sleep that night.  I dreamed that my stomach was four grindstones and that they turned in four directions, according to the four corners of the earth.  I awoke to hear four men yell out, "O, save, O save me from eating any more mussels!"

Company Aytch, pp. 62-63.


On the Fall trip we are going to paddle the exact same section where the Private Watkins took an AWOL joyride in a stolen canoe to try to see his sweetheart in Columbia, Tennessee.  The chapter is called "DOWN DUCK RIVER IN A CANOE - Ora Pro Nobis."

At this place, Duck river wended its way down to Columbia.  On one occasion it was up - had on its Sunday clothes - a booming. Andy Wilson and I thought that we would slip off and go down the river in a canoe.  We got the canoe and started.  It was a leaky craft...

Company Aytch, p. 68.

But we will save that passage, and many other good ones, to be read aloud on the river by the light and hiss of the Coleman lantern.  Teaser:  Ora Pro Nobis means "Pray for us."

Sam Watkins fought in just about every battle that mattered, and marched across or camped next to many of our favorite streams.  He's got passages in the book about the Stones River (right where we were this Spring), the Harpeth, the Tennessee - all the rest of them rebel rivers.