Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
accident in the woods behind her house: “Please forgive me. Thank you for letting us train
our dogs.”
I wanted to say similar thanks when I got invited on a small expedition to a possible
cemetery site in South Carolina. I had watched Kathy Holbert and Lisa Higgins and a num-
ber of other experienced handlers work their dogs on possible grave sites in West Virginia and
Mississippi; Solo hadn't been with me. Then cadaver-dog handler and anthropology graduate
student Paul Martin invited us to South Carolina.
Early-morning mist was still hanging just above the Great Pee Dee River on the border
between North Carolina and South Carolina. A February mist with a bite to it. On a little
bluff overlooking the river stood one lichen-covered stone, placed there by the Daughters
of the American Revolution some time in the 1960s. The DAR had hoped, in planting the
stone, to mark an abandoned cemetery that might include the body of Revolutionary War
Captain Claudius Pegues Jr., who fought alongside the wily Francis Marion. Marion, the
Swamp Fox, led a group of backwoods soldiers against the British, often escaping into the
underbrush or marshes—which was how he got his nickname: “As for this damned old fox,
the Devil himself could not catch him,” swore British Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton.
Claudius Jr. died in 1792, less than a decade after the war of independence was won. He
was reportedly buried here. The bluff overlooks the once-huge Pegues family cotton plant-
ation, the site of the only prisoner exchange during the Revolutionary War. But perhaps
Claudius wasn't here at all. Putting a stone marker on a spot doesn't always make it so.
Claudius Jr.'s great-great-great-great-granddaughter, Pat Franklin, stood at the edge of the
woods, her gray hair swept up in a loose Gibson-girl knot. Pat wasn't familiar with cadaver
dogs; nor was her longtime friend and fellow genealogist May MacCallum. But after May
read about dogs finding graves, she did her research, and ultimately, they called Paul.
Pat was uncertain how the family records, letters, wills, and oral history coalesced. Her
grandmother always told her “the old burying ground” was at the Charrows, where we were
now, looking over the river, and that a coach whip snake guarded the spot. A coach whip
snake is long, fast, and smart, with large dark eyes and scales that look like braided leather. It
will chase you, whip you to death with its tail, and then stick the tip of its tail up your nose
to make sure you're not breathing.
Childhood fears gone, Pat wanted to know where her ancestors lay. Claudius Jr., his wife,
Marcia Murphy, and perhaps four infant children might rest in front of us in the woods. Two
children died the same year they were born; two were dead by the time they were two. Had
they lived, they would have been heirs to a large cotton plantation. Their wealth didn't spare
them the early death that greeted so many infants. Some took their mothers with them. One
record indicates that Claudius Jr.'s mother, Henriette Pegues, may have been buried here just
days after she gave birth to an infant girl in 1758. The records don't show what happened to
