Memories, by James Walton Biggers, Jr.
(Typed exactly as found  on  handwritten copy.  I had asked him to speak into tape recorder but he felt like he writed to wite it first. Only a fragment of the recording survives . Parens are editorial remarks, except as noted)


The date is March 10, 1979. This is a narrative by James Walton Biggers, Jr. born August 4, 1904 to James Walton Senior and Bobbie Castleberry Biggers whose father, James Castleberry, died when she was 13 years old. I have a picture of his family taken when my mother was a few months old. Her mother, Addie Patterson Castleberry, died aged 69 when I was 6 years old and because she lived with a daughter in Columbus, Georgia, and we were in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, at the time I saw her only when we visited Columbus. My memory of her is of a quiet, pleasant person, about the same height as my mother ("at 5 feet five inches" crossed out - JBB) and a little stout. Grandmother Castleberry was buried in Cusseta, the county seat of Chattachoochee County Georgia, where her husband had been Judge of the court for many years. That was the first funeral I had attended and it left a vivid memory. An incident at the farmhouse of a relative where we went for dinner after the funeral I shall relate later.

My mother and father were married on August 21, 1902 in Columbus where they lived for about four years. His mother and father were living across the Chattachoochee River Girard, a suburb of Phenix City, Russell County, Alabama. I was born in the home of Lorenzo John and Frances Garland Biggers, but I have only a vague recollection of them (then) because we moved from Columbus to Montgomery, Alabama, when I was a little over two years old, then in about a year to Tuscaloosa. That vague recollection is a day we spent ("of a meal we had" crossed out) at their house on one of our trips from Tuscaloosa to visit my mother's relatives in Columbus. One memory of that day is a trip to the store with my Aunt Ione, 10 years older than I. We took a short cut which included a footbridge over a ravine about 20 feet deep and 50 feet wide. Under the bridge was a cow struggling to get out of the muddy marsh. Years later, after my grandfather died and my grandmother came to live with us I heard her say, when she did anything on a Sunday that could be called work, "Jesus aid it is all right to work on the Sabbath if you are getting your ox out of the ditch." (Luke 14.5) (author's parens)

Uncle Ivey, my father's brother, had moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee and married. In 1910 my grandfather and grandmother Biggers, with their two youngest daughters, followed. The next year we also moved to Chattanooga. Uncle Ivey  and his wife, his mother and father and their youngest daughter, Aunt Ione, were living in a large house in St. Elmo, near the bottom of the Incline, a pair of cable cars on tracks that takes one car up a very steep grade to the top of Lookout Mountain as the other car comes down. We moved in with them until my father found a house for us on Missionary Ridge in time for me to start the school year in the second grade. At St. Elmo, with six adults, a teen-aged cousin, a sister two years younger and a baby sister just a few months old - that was no place for me. I remember spending as much time as I could out of the house - roaming the woods up the side of Lookout Mountain to a cliff with a vertical wall of stone about 200 feet high which Union soldiers climbed during the Civil War to surprise and defeat the Confederate force holding the mountain. That engagement is called "The Battle Above the Clouds" because the Union force chose a morning when a low-hanging cloud brought visibility down to practically zero.

It was not until after we had made two more moves - from Missionary Ridge to East Side, then to North Chattanooga, across the Tennessee River from the main part of town, that I really had a chance to get acquainted with my grandfather and grandmother.  They, with aunt Ione, moved in with us when we occupied the house. It was a two-story house with four rooms upstairs and four downstairs plus an addition at the back containing the dining room and kitchen. My grandparents, Aunt Ione, and a niece of my mother's, Irene Dillard who had come up from Georgia to live with us while she finished her senior year of high school, occupied the upper floor and we the downstairs rooms. Grandmother and mother cooperated on the cooking and we had meals together. I remember the evening meal as quite formal. Grandfather was an ordained minister and a circuit rider in Alabama. When he said grace it seemed to me he was preaching a sermon. He was a strict disciplinarian. Once, I remember he corrected me rather forcefully and my father told him not to discipline that way again.

At the end of the school year Aunt Ione and Cousin Irene graduated from high school. My Father bought a house with some acreage for his parents on Waldens Ridge, about 15 miles north of where we were living. The land was on a plateau at the top of the mountain. There were, I would estimate, about three acres of cleared land plus an apple orchard of around one hundred trees; also a barn and other outbuildings. My grandparents had a horse and a light wagon, a couple of cows, some pigs and chickens.  For two summers my mother, my two sisters and I spent several weeks each summer up on the mountain. My grandfather taught me how to swing an ax and how to notch a tree to make it fall where you wanted (a lesson he used into his seventies - JBB), and how to work a crosscut saw. One safety measure he impressed on me was always, when trimming a fallen tree, stand on the opposite side of the trunk from Th. limb you are cutting off. And, of course, my routine chore was to keep the wood box full for my grandmother's cooking stove.

When we made our visit to the mountain, the crops from the garden were beginning to ripen and I helped my grandfather pick beans, tomatoes, etc. and rode in the wagon with him about five miles across the top of the ridge to Signal mountain, a promontory across the Tennessee River valley from Lookout Mountain. There had been a railroad track laid to the top of Signal Mountain and wealthy families had built a community of summer homes there. We would make the trip once a week and would always sell our entire load.

But it wasn't all work for me at the farm. My grandfather let me put the bridle on the horse and ride along to the nearest neighbor's house about a half mile away, and I would take the opportunity to explore logging roads and old roadbeds branching off the main road.

One day during the summer after my first year in school something happened which now, 67 years later, is still a vivid memory. Buffaloes Bill's Wild West Show came to our town. We were living in a new subdivision in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. There was a farm across the street with a pasture directing in front of our house. The horse that occupied the pasture and I had become very good friends. I would walk beside him as he grazed and stroke his head and scratch his ears, then wrap my arms around his neck and let him lift me up so I could slide down his neck onto his back, then sit there while he continued to graze. So with that experience you can see what a thrill it was when my father took me to see Buffalo Bill.

Tuscaloosa is a town almost the size of Petersburg. We had gone downtown that morning to watch the parade. It was wonderful - all those beautiful horses and cowboys and Indians and stagecoaches - the most wonderful thing I had ever seen.  Then that afternoon in the arena the show opened with a repeat of the parade. Buffalo Bill was an imposing figure, with his long white hair and beard and his fancy western costume, on his prancing horse. There was a woman riding beside him astride another beautiful horse. The parade circled the arena at an increasing pace then at a run left the field, except for a group of cowboys who put on an exhibition of trick riding that I have never seen equaled. 

(Note for you moderns: As you read this, remember this was a small Southern town, before television and practical moving pictures. The only thing these folks might have seen, were photographs, stereopticons or maybe magic lanterns, but nothing approaching the scale of what you're about to read - JBB)

With the horses at a stretched-out run they would reach down and pick up a handkerchief off the ground, stand up in the saddle and turn around, swing completely around the horse, jump off and let the horse circle the field then run along beside him and swing back into the saddle - all this and more! There were roping exhibitions and bucking bronco riding and a group of Indians riding bareback did almost all the trick riding that the cowboys had done. A big board was brought out and placed upright about where the pitchers mound would be on a baseball and a table with rifles, revolvers and ammunition was placed at the home base position, then the woman (Annie Oakley) who had been riding in the parade with Buffalo Bill came galloping in and swung off her horse at the table. The shooting she did with those guns was unbelievable!

There were other attractions, such as a stagecoach pulled by about a dozen of the smallest ponies I have ever seen, balking donkeys that had the audience roaring with laughter, a group of  Indians setting up teepees and making themselves at home, and cowboys showing their skills at  working a herd of cattle. Then for the finale a stagecoach pulled by six horses came tearing into the arena followed by all the Indians shooting their rifles and being shot at by the people in the stagecoach. After they had circled the field two or three times the air was filled with dust and gunpowder smoke and the sound of the explosions and the yelling of the Indians. At last, with bodies hanging limp out of the stage coach windows and dead Indians and horses scattered over the ground, the cowboys came charging in, finishing off the rest of the Indians, caught the runaway stagecoach horses, and everything stopped completely still for a few moments, except for a horse here and there switching his tail. 

In the years since this tableau was etched in my memory, I have attended rodeos from a small town in Texas to Madison Square Garden in New York City, I have ridden a working cowpony and cut a steer out of a herd, roped cattle, swung down from a galloping horse and picked up my hat off the ground, stood upright on the saddle with my horse at a gallop and jumped horses over a four-foot rail, but never have I had the thrill or excitement that day when Buffalo Bill came to town.