‘Capt. Smith’s Bear Story’ is hard to top

I’ve driven by the bear-crossing sign at the hospital countless times since it was put up about a year ago, but the other day on my way home, I saw the sign and it got me to thinking about bears. As far as I know, no one’s reported seeing any bears in Monroeville lately, but who’s to say how many bears cross South Alabama Avenue in the middle of the night when no one’s watching. There may be more bears in our area than we think.

As I continued on to the house, I remembered the funniest bear story I’ve ever heard from our corner of the world. In 1846, several newspapers across Alabama published a tale called “Capt. Smith’s Bear Story,” and two men from Lower Peach Tree figured prominently in this supposedly-true story. The best available version of this story appeared in the Sept. 19, 1846 edition of The Alabama Beacon newspaper in Greensboro, in a column they called “The Humorist.”

The tale begins about the year 1830 when a man known as “Capt. Smith” settled in the Lower Peach Tree community. There, he planted a few acres of corn, cotton, potatoes and a small family garden. As the story goes, he lived a short distance from a man named John Champion, who was in his early 40s.

“My nearest neighbor (John Champion), being better off than the rest of us, had a nice gang of hogs,” Capt. Smith said. “And, feeling a little above his neighbors on account of his wealth, and being a rather overbearing man, too, was not particular whether his stock broke into other people’s fields or not.”

Capt. Smith said that his crop was too small to feed his family and Champion’s hogs too, so he complained to Champion about the hog situation several times, but Champion would never do anything about it. Not long after that, Smith paid a visit to an old neighbor named Erasmus Culpepper, who knew an old-timey trick to fix the hog problem.

Culpepper told him that “if a foot, or even a piece of bearskin was thrown down in a place where hogs (trespass) that they would never show their snouts there again. I went home and got the skin of a bear which I had killed some time before, and having supplied myself with some corn, I went out and saw about 20 fine year-old (hogs) munching away in my field. I ‘tolled them up,’ and catching a good runner, sewed him up in the bear skin, and then turned him loose, when he ran after the rest, who flew from the supposed bear.”

The last that was seen of those hogs was at Bassett’s Creek, which was nearly 40 miles from Smith’s house, “only two being alive, one running from the one sewed up in the skin, and he trying to catch the other – the rest were found dead in the road, having literally run themselves to death. It is needless to add that John Champion’s hogs stayed at home after that.”

In the end, when it comes to bear stories from our neck of the woods, it’s hard to top “Capt. Smith’s Bear Story.” I enjoy hearing these old tales as well as local legends, ghost stories and old folk tales. If anyone in the reading audience has anything along those lines that they would like to share, please don’t hesitate to get up with me.