An old horse, quite smart and active

He was twenty-one and he had less than four dollars, and on the nineteenth of March he started walking.

His father had brought the family to Milford Township in 1836, into a hewed log house, on land he had entered before the family arrived. Seven or eight hundred acres, and forty more with a water-powered sawmill on them. In the spring of 1837 the machinery came from Detroit by ox team.

Six years later the son left, on foot, heading for Iowa.

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A man joined him in Illinois and they went on together.

They stopped on the North Fork of the Skunk River and established a claim. They built a log house on it. They cleared an acre and planted it to potatoes, and when the potatoes came up they traded the crop for a yoke of steers.

Then they went down the Skunk River to near Burlington, and on to Galena, and made a short stop at St. Louis, and then to Arkansas, where he cut wood for two months. Then New Orleans. Then Horse Shoe Bend.

About the first of April, 1844, back at Galena, he traded for a good horse and rode home in seven days.

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His father died that August.

Charles inherited eighty acres, which he would have had if he had never left, and by then he had traded for forty more. He built on them, and by 1882 he was living in the first brick house put up in the township, with four hundred and sixty acres, and property estimated with the land at forty thousand dollars.

He had married Ann Henry in 1849. They had seven children and three of them were dead when the book was printed.

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That is the ordinary part, and it is the part the county history usually keeps.

Four hundred and five men have biographies in that volume. A hundred and sixty-six of them end on nothing in particular. Of the rest, most end on a man's family, or his church, or an office he held, or his politics, or what he owned. Five end on an animal, and four of those are counting stock.

Almost all of them are the same document: parents, arrival, what he cleared, what he holds now, his church, his party, and a line about being respected. The middle one runs two hundred and fifty-one words.

The book has a settled way of handling a man's twenties. It skips them. J. C. Bassett, in Cochran's own township, gets eighteen years of his life in twenty-eight words. Amiziah Reed, also in Milford, goes from a birth in 1817 straight to a marriage in 1849, and everything the book puts between them is his parents' movements. When it does follow a young man out of the county, the journey ends in a land entry, because that is what makes it worth printing.

Cochran's walk to Iowa takes up a third of his sketch and it ends where it started. He came back with a horse.

He turns up once more in the county's record, fourteen years later, as one of the men who met at the Bullock Schoolhouse and organised the county's first company of Regulators.

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His biography ends on one sentence, and it is the reason this piece exists.

Mr. and Mrs. Cochran are Spiritualists, and he is owner of an old horse, quite smart and active, that was born May 10, 1852.

It does two things and it does them in one breath, joined by an and, as though they were the same kind of fact.

The first is where a church would go.

This county had spiritualists and the book knows it. Chapter III has a section on the movement. Mediums of great repute were brought in from abroad and large crowds came to the seances at Mongo. The Greenfield chapter says the subject was first developed there about 1850 by the celebrated Fox sisters. At Lexington the spiritualists held the union meeting house under protest from the more orthodox denominations.

But in four hundred and five biographies only three men are named as spiritualists, and the other two are hedged. One was reared a Baptist and became one in his later days. Cyrus Fillmore is recorded as a member of the Disciples' Church and a spiritualist, in that order.

Cochran and his wife are just spiritualists, in the present tense, in the slot where the book puts a denomination.

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And then the second half, on the other side of the comma.

Five sketches out of four hundred and five end on an animal. Four of them are counting stock: so many sheep, so many cattle, finely bred horses. One man's horse is a unit of poverty in a sum about how he got from three dollars to eleven thousand seven hundred.

Cochran's horse is not stock and not arithmetic. It has a birth date. It was thirty years old when the book went to press, and somebody thought that was the last thing worth saying about him.

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Agents called on upward of three thousand people across two counties and wrote down what those people told them. So the shape of one is a record of what a man said about himself when somebody came to the door with a notebook, and this one refused the form three times: a third of it on a journey that produced nothing, no church in the place a church goes, and a horse where the certificate should be.

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The father, and two things the record will not settle

Colonel William Cochran was born in Ireland and married a Kentucky woman. The family were early settlers of Ross County, Ohio, moved to Marion County in 1822, and came here in 1836. He was elected road supervisor at Milford's first election in 1837. A small Baptist society was organised at his house and lasted a few years. A school building near his mill carried his name for decades. He brought three trained Siberian bloodhounds with him from Ohio, and the county history says they were savage animals and had to be watched.

He died in August of 1844, aged fifty-six, four months after his son rode home.

The mill is two accounts that do not meet. His son's sketch says he bought forty acres with a water-powered sawmill already on them, and hauled the machinery from Detroit by ox team in the spring of 1837. The township chapter of the same book says he built a dam at the outlet of Long Lake in the autumn of 1836 and put up the first sawmill in the township over a short race, with a flutter wheel and a sash saw, and that it was still running in 1882. Both are in the same volume. Neither mentions the other.

The colonelcy is not accounted for anywhere. Battey calls him Colonel four times and never once explains it. Ford uses the title in one passage and drops it in another. No regiment, no war, no militia, no service of any kind is recorded for him in either book.