Capt. Scott’s Raccoon

“..And I never was satisfied at his givin’ in so easily at last. Perhaps he had heard of my preparations to hunt him the next day so he had just come in, Like

While listening to The Bear Grease podcast, I heard the host Clay Newcomb, recite the above epigram. The phrase, “like Captain Scott’s raccoon” rang a bell with me since I had just heard it mentioned in another unrelated historical account. I hadn’t previously noticed the phrase and wondered, “who was this Scott character”?

According to the City of Fredericksburg, Texas website, Martin Scott was born in 1788 in Vermont and enlisted with the Green Mountain Boys in the War of 1812. Scott spent most of his time in the army at forts in the northwest. (Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin today).

After he became an officer, those that served under him described him as being someone who “was an interesting man, with strong, alert, athletic figure, bright, eager, keen grey eyes, and ruddy face, bronzed by long exposure. He was a great disciplinarian.” Others said Martin Scott always had a good horse and a pack of hunting dogs. By age 12 he had killed his first bear, and by the 1820’s Scott had a reputation for being the best shot in the army. This at a time when many of those serving in the military grew up with a rifle in their hands. To be thought of among these straight-shooting frontiersmen as “the best” was high praise. Scott did not drink or gamble, leading some to believe he was anti-social.

But he could shoot. One of the things Scott demonstrated to achieve his status among peers is reported by a fellow soldier in an 1866 book. Randolph Barnes Marcy, U.S. Army Inspector General, Retired, in his, Thirty Years of Army Life on the Border, described Scott’s marksmanship by writing:

“His reputation for accurate rifle and pistol shooting was well deserved; and I am not aware that he was ever excelled, if indeed he was ever equaled, by any of his contemporaries. One of his performances with the pistol, which I have often heard vouched for by officers who had witnessed it, and which appears to me to require more skill in the use of the arm than any other feat I have heard of, was in taking two potatoes, throwing them into the air successively, and putting a pistol-ball through both of them as they were coming down.” Impressive indeed.

Scott gained this legendary status in the 1830’s and 40’s during a time when the southern storytelling genre was born. The later success of published tall tales like “The Big Bear of Arkansas” by Thomas Thorpe in 1841 was so great, that some historians have named certain southwestern contemporaries of Thorpe’s, the Big Bear school of humorists. It eventually influenced authors like Mark Twain and comedians of our time like the late Jerry Clower. (For more on The Big Bear of Arkansas, Listen to episode 94 of The Bear Grease Podcast).

Bear hunters, ‘coon hunters, hound men and outdoor folks in general like a good hunting story. The soldiers of Scott’s acquaintance were used to some whoppers. Scott apparently liked to tell one about himself, in the spirit of the times, involving a raccoon that had been treed by a dog in a very tall cottonwood.

An 1832 version of the oft-repeated raccoon hunt story appeared in the American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine and describes the famous tale eluded to by our bear hunter, giving it a Little Rock, Arkansas byline. The story says both Captain Scott and a Lieutenant named Van Swearengen stationed at old Fort Smith on the Arkansas river liked to hunt. He described Lt. Swearengen as a “notoriously bad shot.”

“It appears that a dog had treed a racoon in a very tall cottonwood, and after barking loud and long to no purpose, the coon expostulated with him, and endeavoured to convince him of the absurdity of spending his time and labour at the foot of the tree, and assured him that he had not the most distant idea of coming down the tree, and begs him as a fellow creature to leave him to the enjoyment of his rights. The dog replied naturally, but I fear not, in the same conciliatory style of the coon, but threatened him with the advent of some one that would bring him down. At this moment a cracking in the cane indicated the approach of some individual; the coon asked the dog who it was? The dog replied with some exultation, that it was Lieutenant Van Swearengen—the coon laughed, and he laughed with a strong expression of scorn about his mouth: “Lieutenant Van Swearengen, indeed, he may shoot and be d—nd.” Van Swearengen made five or six ineffectual shots, and left the coon, to the great discomfiture of the dog, still unscathed, and laughing on the top of the tree. The dog smothered his chagrin by barking louder and louder, and the coon laughed louder and louder, until the merriment of the one, and the mortification of the other, was arrested by the approach of some other person. The coon inquired who it was, the dog answered with quickness that it was Scott:—Who? asked the coon, evidently agitated! Why, Martin Scott, by G—d. The coon cried in the anguish of despair, that he was a gone coon; rolled up the white of his eyes, folded his paws on his breast, and tumbled out of the tree at the mercy of the dog, without making the least struggle for that life which he had, but a few minutes before, so vauntingly declared and believed was in no kind of danger.”

And so the saying, “Like Capt Scott’s Raccoon” was born. If someone just gave up in some endeavor or surrendered, or turned themselves in to the authorities, it was said he did so like Captain Scott’s raccoon. Now you know.