Jonas Cattell from “Memoirs of the Gloucester Foxhunting Club” by William Milnor, Jr., Philadelphia, 1830Jonas Cattell, foxhunter and revolutionary hero, will be honored with a seven-foot bronze statue to be erected in Haddonfield, New Jersey. We foxhunters know about Cattell’s exploits in the hunting field thanks to Alexander Mackay-Smith’s classic book, The American Foxhound: 1747–1967, but I never knew about Cattell’s heroism during the American Revolution. He turned the misfortune of his arrest by Hessian mercenaries into advantage for the Colonial cause.
Cattell whipped-in for the Gloucester Foxhunting Club, the first organized foxhunting club in North America. It was founded in 1766 by a group of Philadelphia gentlemen and named for Gloucester County, New Jersey, directly across the Delaware River. According to Mackay-Smith, quoting Clifton Lisle describing their sport, “When Cupid, the huntsman who succeeded Old Natty, was in the saddle with Jonas Cattell whipping-in to him, amazing runs were made.”
“In 1798, for example, one is recorded that went to Salem, a distance of forty miles by the map from find to kill. Another ended on the ice of the Delaware, a Jersey fox crossing it with fifteen couple of hounds not a hundred yards from his brush—to be rolled over just short of the Jersey shore. Robert Wharton, president of the club at that time, was the first man up, next to Jonas Cattell, the whipper-in, who had crossed the river on foot.”
Some twenty years earlier, on an October evening in 1777, eighteen-year-old Cattell was arrested by Hessian mercenaries. Bad luck, one might think, but his arrest proved incredibly helpful to the patriot cause. Young Cattell overheard his captors that night talking about an attack on the Americans who were holding Fort Mercer in Red Bank.
Released the next day, Cattell didn’t hesitate. He ran ten miles, around the Hessian troops, to alert the colonials who, as a result of his warning, had time to reposition their artillery and repel the larger force. While his run is memorialized in the annual Jonas Cattell Run to the Red Bank Battlefield in National Park, it will now be permanently honored with his statue there.
Edward Colimore’s article in the Philadelpia Inquirer describes the statue of Jonas Cattell that sculptor Terry Jones is planning. In the bronze-to-be, Cattell is “wearing a tricorne hat, grasping a flintlock musket, and running alongside a dog.” That mental image rang a bell with me, so I pulled Mackay-Smith’s book off the shelf—I keep it handy—and sure enough, there was the image reproduced from Memoirs of the Gloucester Foxhunting Club by William Milnor, Jr., Philadelphia, 1830. The only differences I note are that Cattell isn’t wearing a tricorne in this old engraving, and the “dog” looks like two foxhounds to me! I’ll give sculptor Terry Jones artistic license on the headgear, but we hope he gets the canine part of it right!
Posted September 13, 2013