Page:The Poets and Poetry of the West.djvu/188

WILLIAM O. BUTLER. William Orlando Butler, son of Percival Butler, who was an Adjutant General in the Americati Army in the War of 1812, was born in Jessamine county, Kentucky, in 1793. The profession of law was selected for William by his father, and he was about to devote himself to it, when the war of 1812 broke out. He en- listed as a private soldier in Captain Hart's company of Kentucky volunteers, and on the march to the North-western frontier was elected Corporal. Soon after that election he was appointed Ensign in the Seventeenth Regiment of United States In- fantry. He distinguished himself in several skirmishes. At the battle of River Raisin, January twenty-second, 1813, he was among the few Avounded who escaped massacre by the Indians. Taken prisoner by the Bi'itish, he was marched through Canada to Fort Niagara. In a biographical notice of Mr. Butler, Francis P. Blair has given some account of his life as a prisoner of war, from which we quote : Then his mind wandered back to the last night scene which he surveyed on the bloody shores of Raisin. He gave up the heroic part, and became a school-boy again, and commemorated his sor- rows for his lost friends in verse, lilie some passionate, heart-broken lover. These elegiac strains were never intended for the eye of any but mutual friends, whose sympathies, like his own, poured out tears with then* plaints over the dead. We give some of these lines of boyhood to show that the heroic youth had a bosom not less kind than brave. They are introductory to what maybe con- sidered a succession of epitaphs on the friends whose bodies the young soldier found on the field : THE FIELD OP EAISIN. The battle's o'er ! the din is past ; Night's mantle on the field is cast ; The Indian yell is heard no more ; The silence broods o'er Erie's shore. At this lone hour I go to tread The field where valor vainly bled — To raise the wounded warrior's crest, Or warm with tears his icy breast, To treasure up his last command, And bear it to his native land. It may one pulse of joy impart To a fond mother's bleeding heart ; Or for a moment it may dry The tear-drop in the widow's eye. Vain hope, away ! The widow ne'er Her warrior's dying wish shall hear. The passing zephyr bears no sigh, No wounded warrior meets the eye — Death is his sleep by Erie's wave, Of Raisin's snow we heap his grave ! How many hopes lie murdered here — The mother's joy, the father's pride, The country's boast, the foeman's fear. In wilder'd havoc, side by side. Lend me, thou silent queen of night, Lend me awhile thy waning light, That I may see each well-loved form. That sunk beneath the morning storm. Immediately after an exchange of prisoners had been made, by which Mr. Butler was permitted to return from Canada, he was pi-omoted to a Captaincy. On the twenty-third of December, 1814, he was brevetted Major for conspicuous services in the battles at Pensacola and New Orleans. He was aid-de-camp to General Jack- son, from June seventeenth, 1816, to May thirty-first, 1817. He then tendered his resignation, and for the next twenty-five years devoted himself to the practice of the law in Kentucky, residing on a patrimonial estate, near the confluence of the Kentucky and Ohio rivers. From 1839 to 1843, Mr. Butler was a Representative in Congress. In 1844 he (172)