Many wore fine boots of calf skin with red tops, drawn over their trousers, and high heels and blue and red shirts and broad brimmed straw hats.

A long haired man, in buckskin leggings and moccasins, with a knife at his belt and too much whisky beneath it, amused a crowd by a loud proclamation of his own reckless and redoubtable character and a louder appeal for a chance to put it in action.

It was a droll bit of bragging and merely intended, as the chronicler informs us, to raise a laugh.
"Here I be half man an' half alligator," he shouted.

"Oh, I'm one o' yer tough kind, live forever an' then turn into a hickory post.

I've just crept out o' the ma'shes of ol' Kentuck.