Kentucky Author "No Sweat"
My World for a Horse
by No Sweat
On Sunday, February 18, 2001, Alan Jones and I
left to dig at Camp Nelson, Kentucky. By 8:00 am we were in the woods and soon
split up. Alan knew my goal was to return to the place where I had discovered
what promised to be the burial of a Civil War horse at a location on privately owned
property, and I had the owner’s permission to dig.
I came with my camera and detector, and soon
found myself removing the frozen surface initially covering what I hoped would
be my horse. Once I broke through using my WW2 army shovel and bayonet, I found
the dirt to change and become soft and then muddy, sticking to anything it
touched. And as the day progressed and the temperature rose, steam steadily
rose from the ground.
I found the site undisturbed and after eight
hours of continuous digging, I was approximately three feet deep, having
uncovered the entire skeleton of the horse.
I had placed an importance on this find as it is
the only definite Civil War horse I or anyone I knew had even dug at Camp
Nelson in over 25 years of digging the vast area, having once been the Union
army supply depot encompassing nearly 5,000 acres and supporting some 5,000
soldiers.
I was
confident that this was definitely a Civil War horse because of its location
which remained my secret. And because the area was virgin and any metal
definitely Civil War or earlier; and within twenty feet of the horse I had
found a US box plate, an eagle breast plate, a bullseye canteen, an Austrian
lock plate, the complete remains of a McClellan saddle, a curry comb, five
officer’s eagle buttons, minie balls, Drakes log cabin bitter bottle fragments
and other relics confirming this to be a solid Civil War site.
I studied the position of the horse’s skeleton
and could plainly see that the horse had been carefully laid out over a large
limestone rock and then covered up; it was obvious the horse had been loved;
not one bone had been touched by a rodent or was out of place.
While excavating the horse, I found an odd iron
spike having a hook coming out of it. The reason I ever discovered the horse at
all was due to the horse shoes still attached to him – my metal detector had
alerted me to them.
The worst
thing about the skeleton was the fact that roots had grown through the skull
causing damage. From the best guess I could make, the horse had been large and owned
a narrow face; it looked to be an old horse owning worn teeth; perhaps one of
the officers “old friend’ having been buried separately from the thousands of
horses once helping to comprise Camp Nelson.
I didn’t know if I wasted my time in digging up
a horse, but feel not. The horse was such a vital part of the Civil War and yet
they are rarely given thought. Here in this one lonely grave still lies the
remains of just one of what once was in the hundreds of thousands.
About the Author
Kentucky author, Earl Lowell "Robbie" / "No Sweat"
Robbins, Jr., Born in Pattie. A. Clay Hospital, Richmond, Kentucky, USA.
Graduated from Irvine, Kentucky High School. Entering Eastern Kentucky
University he became one of Coach Don Combs' "Electrifying
Eels," swimming long distance events for one of the best swim teams
in the nation. He received his BA, MA in anthropology and sociology. During
his senior year, he married Ruth Chesteen Hall in the university's chapel.
The couple has one child, Nancy Chesteen, the mother of Lance Lowell Fuller and
Barrett Mathew.
"No Sweat" began writing as a boy often sitting for hours alone in a corner chair in the apartment that he grew up in, belonging to his grandfather, Russell McClanahan. This apartment was located at the end of the Irvine, Kentucky Bridge and situated nearly atop his grandfather's "MACK" theater. In the production of the movie, The Flim Flam Man, staring George C. Scott, there is a scene in which is filmed recklessly driving across the same actual bridge. No Sweat's uneducated and domineering father operated a small fruit and vegetable stand located across the street of the apartment and his mother sold tickets in the theater; both were alcoholics. "No Sweat" spent much of his growing years swimming in the near-by Kentucky river, playing along the railroad tracks beside the apartment, being with his grandfather inside the theater, hunting Indian relics in the near-by plowed fields, catching pigeons roosting on the bridge and camping and caving while a boy scout in Troop 144 under the scoutmaster, Charles Vanhuss.
"No Sweat" eventually found publishers to take some of his work in 2012; editor Rudy Thomas, Old Seventy Creek Press, publishing These Precious Days, and editor Carol Itoh, Itoh Press, publishing Nefarious. In late August, 2015 No Sweat completed a book he had been working on and off on for over 30 years called LA GUERRE EST FINIE; in 2015, he changed the title to, My Singer Island, and, as of this writing, is in final stages of editing. My Singer Island is a 700 page non-fiction memoir taking place over sixty summers on Singer Island, Florida; many of those summers while living three month stints at The Colonnades Beach Hotel; the work involves No Sweat's relationship with John D. MacArthur, then the richest man in the USA, Luisa Lang and her father Will Lang, LIFE magazine's best WW2 war correspondent and good friend of Ernest Hemingway, Arlo Gunthrie, folk singer, Guy Davenport, Literary critic, the Kennedy family and many others; along with the 300 pages of text are some 400 photographs; it is "a book for everyone.
"No Sweat" began writing as a boy often sitting for hours alone in a corner chair in the apartment that he grew up in, belonging to his grandfather, Russell McClanahan. This apartment was located at the end of the Irvine, Kentucky Bridge and situated nearly atop his grandfather's "MACK" theater. In the production of the movie, The Flim Flam Man, staring George C. Scott, there is a scene in which is filmed recklessly driving across the same actual bridge. No Sweat's uneducated and domineering father operated a small fruit and vegetable stand located across the street of the apartment and his mother sold tickets in the theater; both were alcoholics. "No Sweat" spent much of his growing years swimming in the near-by Kentucky river, playing along the railroad tracks beside the apartment, being with his grandfather inside the theater, hunting Indian relics in the near-by plowed fields, catching pigeons roosting on the bridge and camping and caving while a boy scout in Troop 144 under the scoutmaster, Charles Vanhuss.
"No Sweat" eventually found publishers to take some of his work in 2012; editor Rudy Thomas, Old Seventy Creek Press, publishing These Precious Days, and editor Carol Itoh, Itoh Press, publishing Nefarious. In late August, 2015 No Sweat completed a book he had been working on and off on for over 30 years called LA GUERRE EST FINIE; in 2015, he changed the title to, My Singer Island, and, as of this writing, is in final stages of editing. My Singer Island is a 700 page non-fiction memoir taking place over sixty summers on Singer Island, Florida; many of those summers while living three month stints at The Colonnades Beach Hotel; the work involves No Sweat's relationship with John D. MacArthur, then the richest man in the USA, Luisa Lang and her father Will Lang, LIFE magazine's best WW2 war correspondent and good friend of Ernest Hemingway, Arlo Gunthrie, folk singer, Guy Davenport, Literary critic, the Kennedy family and many others; along with the 300 pages of text are some 400 photographs; it is "a book for everyone.
Other writing projects include, The Confession of Edward W. Hawkins: Fact
& Fiction; Black Bluegrass, a
collection of short stories he experienced while working in a small liquor
store surrounded by black Americans in eastern Kentucky; Pigeon, a collection of stories
involving his experiences and imaginations with racing pigeons and his
lifelong relationship with Charles Heitzman of the French Sion fame.
Of note, No Sweat is a National acclaimed
champion with racing pigeons having won more than 800 first places in
both showing and racing. Unbridled,
currently another one of his works in progress, is a collection
of archaeological stories that No Sweat has experienced including his
discovering the largest group of Arawak burials ever located in the
Bahamas on an island called Eleuthera. His twenty-five years
of excavations at Lincoln's experimental Civil War city, Camp Nelson, the
thirty days he spent digging with the University of Kentucky while
excavating Fort Boonesborough, his narrow escape from marijuana growers
while digging some of the finest Kentucky red agates; some of which are now
with The Smithsonian. And last, he hopes to complete a photo essay
encompassing his beautiful wife’s life entitled, Chesteen.
Read more about No Sweat here
Visit No Sweat’s website…
No Sweat’s Riding & Writing Guest Posts…
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