The Hunter’s Horn
December, 1974
Page Sixty-six & Sixty seven
Old Time Walker Hounds
By Bob Lee Maddux
Editors Note: This is a preprint of an item that appeared in The Horn some years ago.
The descriptive phrase of “Old Line Walker Hounds” bobs up so often in our reading matter as
published by the hound magazines that lately I have been pondering the exact meaning of the
thing. Also many stud dog owners use the expression without stating further in their advertising
just what is the meaning and, evidently, rely upon the reader to figure it out for himself. I think it a
good idea to say something at this time in order that the regular users of the term may clarify it for
the general use of the interested public.
The last S. L. Wooldridge’s use of the term was defined as “old-line” the Walker hound which had
no cross of the English importation made by Col. Jack Chinn of the Walker brothers about 1893, but
the blood was not generally diffused until after 1910, when Hub Dawson, his littermate, Alex, and
later by Big Stride and Woods Walker’s Cork, the blood was scattered to the four corners of the fox
hunting belt. So, now, I am sure that there is not a registered Walker hound in this same territory
which can be classed as
“old-line” under that definition, where the line is drawn at the crossing of the Striver blood.
I asked Mr. Woods Walker about his understanding of the subject, but got a rather uncertain but
not evasive answer. For, he admitted, he had never given the matter any thought, but stated we
could safely say that any hound which traced in all its lines to hounds from the Walkers’ could be
called old-line.
With all the respect I have for the opinions as outlined above and the merit to which they are
entitled I am of the long considered judgment that the expression does not depend upon that one
family for its genesis I think that it is a formula.
The hound “Scott Number Seven” is regarded as the Hamiltonian of the breed. He was bred by
Joel Maupin and sold to W. S. Walker. An analysis of the bloodlines shows that he was about 60
percent native; 30 percent English and 10 percent Tennessee Lead, as were all the hounds of
Walker breeding, which Mr. Wooldridge calls “old-line.” Then about 1900, Mr. W. S. Walker began
using the outcross as provided by the English hound, Striver, which overbalanced the English
blood and disturbed the formula as provided by the breeding of the Maupins. Big Strive by Imp.
Striver was a bench-type hound, and was used extensively because of conformation, for the
National Fox Hunters’ Association came into being about that time and provided a demand for
bench shows. None of that new cross was game, but they were good looking and the breeding
persisted in for the sake of looks. By the time Hub Dawson was whelped that new English cross
had divided itself so many times that Sport, the sire of Hub Dawson and Alex, had just one thirty-
second, or about three percent Striver blood and the Wash Maupin breeding is almost restored.
For Hub Dawson is back to about the original ratio of 6-3-1, and can be classed as “old-line.”
General Wash Maupin’s home was on the Crookesville Pike, near Kingston, Kentucky. His first wife
was Mary Walker, who bore him six sons: Jim, Arch, Seth, Caldwell (Cull), George and Joel, Jim
died a bachelor, the other five rode off with the Confederate cavalry into the war between the
states. Seth was wounded in battle of Mt. Sterling and died from its effects. Joel was only sixteen,
but he and the remaining three followed John Hun Morgan until war’s end for them in the ill fated
raid thru Ohio. George was the father of Jennings and Bill, who bred hounds at Richmond under
the kennel name of Maupin Brothers. Arch was killed in Richmond soon after the war, a bystander
to some gun fight which every town in Dixie knew while the Civil War was still a feud and the ashes
of Southern ruins red hot. Fox hunting with the Maupin family was not a way of life—it was a
passion. They went about the affair of breeding hounds as though it was a business, sparing
neither time nor money nor trouble to improve their native stock which had followed Wash Maupin’
s father, Daniel, “Touch Daniel” that is, from Virginia in fall of 1784.
There were many Daniel Maupins in Albemarle County, Va., so the descriptive term was added
when he was eighteen, then a veteran of the Continental Line with his old commander at Valley
Forge. He saw Cornwallis surrender before he was twenty-one, after which, when peace was
assured, the red clay hills of Albermarle were being compared to the tales of rich, meadow land in
Ol Cantuck, the tidings of which the Long Hunters had spread little by little at tavern and
hearthstone; the strange, new things they had seen on the other side of the mountains. So Daniel
Maupin found himself with his and his neighbor’s families and household plunder in the Great
Road of Virginia, on their way to the promised land. The road led down to headwaters of Steve
Holston’s river at Abingdon where Daniel Boone and Michael Stoner had once camped and were so
entertained by the nearness and volumne of the howling at night that they called the place Wolf
Hills, the legend of which, I am sure, influenced that fine surgeon and Virginia gentleman, Harry
Hayter, in naming that beautiful bitch of his Wolf Hills Serenade. At the Black House they took a
new road which had been cut that year down Carter’s Valley to Bean’s Station, then over Dave
Clinch’s Mountain and Si Clinch’s river to Ambrose Powell’s river, where four miles below
Cumberland Gap, they came in sight of the Cumberland Wall.
Across the murky horizon that Indian Summer day ran the long naked backbone with its missing
vertebrae, covered with green and gold and crimson and splotches of sandstone cliffs like a torn
and bedraggled coverlid hung up in the clouds to air. But the sight which enthralled them was the
magic door in the mountain, where the Warrior’s Path and the Wilderness Trail merged into one to
pass down Yellow Creek Valley, across Wasioto River at the ancient ford, up through the scrubby
flatwoods to the big patch of hazel bushes where Boone’s road left Skagg’s Trace and headed for
the Kentucky River. Here on Boone’s Road, just a few miles below Richmond, Daniel Maupin
possessed his land and reared in two marriages a family of twenty-three children. His second wife
was Margaret McWilliams, whose second child and first son was named from the old Commander,
title and all. So it is that we owe so much to General George Washington Maupin. It was on
November 20, 1852, that Wash Maupin was first seen with the short haired, black and tan hound
that he bought from a horse trader by the name of Harris, who had picked him up in the
Cumberland Mountains not far from the Kentucky line, the same hound that was taken out of a deer
chase that autumn morning to ride in Harris’ buckboard to Madison County, Kentucky, to be known
wherever men sit on opposite side of campfires as “Tennessee Lead.” I have driven hundreds of
miles, read countless pages of land records, asked innumerable questions to satisfy my own
curiosity as to the likely section of our state from which this hound was stolen. Woods Walker’s
only clue was that he was taken “from the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee.” I asked Alex
Parrish, whose wife was a granddaughter of Leland Maupin and great-niece of Uncle Wash. The
only location handed down in their family was that it was not “too far from the state line.” I am
certain that the road did not run through Middleboro, for the very elementary reason that there are
no Cumberland Mountains below the Kentucky state line there, and then, too, that stock road led
into Virginia and the Carolinas. But the great Southern Planter Market had moved from the sand
hills along the coast to the rich bend of the Tennessee River and the Mississippi Delta.
There runs an old trace or stock-road through the records in Tennessee mountain counties called
both the Kentucky Road and the Rock Island Road, depending on which way you were looking, for it
was the same on both ends. It had its northern terminus in the blue grass counties of Kentucky,
gathering its various prongs together at Crab Orchard, running southwestward to cross the
Cumberland River at Mills Spring, on through Wayne and Clinton counties to enter Tennessee near
the forks of Obey and Wolf Rivers, thence up Ashburn’s creek, over the last range of the
Cumberland Mountains through Livingston crossing the Caney Fork at Rock Island, on through
Warren County by way of Viola and into the last Tennessee county of Franklin, which lies along the
Alabama line. Prior to Civil War this road was alive with livestock and traders and wagon trains
moving cotton from the south to factories in Lexington and the North. Harris was 38 years old. He
had many relatives in Franklin County and North Alabama, for when the public lands were thrown
into the market there, many of the early settlers of Kentucky moved over this road into the new
country. Steve and Ed Walker’s mother was born near Winchester, Tennessee, and her father, Big
Bill Kavanaugh, was drowned in the Tennessee River while attempting to swim his horse across.
So it is that I am sure Tennessee Lead was taken from Overton County, Tennessee, and that his
first owner was either John or Mark Jolly or Andrew Kraft. They were deer hunters who lived
among the mountains near where the Kentucky Rock Island Road broke out of the Cumberland
Mountains to enter Obey’s River valley.
Five years after Tennessee Lead was secured by the Maupins a rich banker and land owner of
Madison County, Kentucky, whose name was Jason Walker, imported three English hounds, two
dogs and one bitch in whelp. From this English mating on the Native-Tennessee Lead bitches the
Maupins produced a distinctive hound by 1868. For that year Wash Maupin died, leaving two sons
to carry on, but their very serious fault was that they kept no records of any sort what-so-ever. The
hound, Spotted Top bred by Wash Maupin’s sister’s son, Neil Gooch, was the first hound to have
his breeding recorded for information of future generations. That hound was bred in 1864, but had
no English cross. He was the offspring of Tennessee Lead stock on Native hounds.
From about 1870 we are indebted, solely, to the Walker Brothers of Garrard County for the
preservation of this breed. They bought from Wash Maupin, the year before he died, Spotted Top.
Then they bought Scott and White Trav, littermates, from Joe Maupin, and from the other hounds
they had previously purchased they preserved the blood in its proper ratio of 6-3-1 until about
1900, when the Striver cross enters.
We are indebted to W. S. Walker, Arch Walker and Wade Walker for dispersing the blood to
Missouri, Texas, Tennessee, and throughout the South. For Ed Walker, while the best hunter of
the four, would not sell a hound. He bought every good one that he ever knew about, but kept
them for his own hunting pleasure, and allowed them to be scattered only through his stud dogs.
He never did like the Striver cross. One morning he and Tom Steagall of Crab Orchard were
hunting on the Henry Baker Ridge. The hounds were working hard to lift their fox. One, a young
bitch by Big Strive, was switching around too near the casting place to suit Mr. Walker, so Tom, out
of his Irish devilment, asked Mr. Ed how he liked the new English cross. “Well,” he said, “one
eighth of it does fairly well, but one sixteenth is much better.”
There is much black ink used on white paper lately to try and establish the fact that old hounds
were better than the new. I have read with much interest the arguments and assertions of the two
sides. Much has been said both pro and con that is on the subject and off the thing altogether.
There are some factors that have never been developed to my satisfaction. For instance, the
difference in hunting conditions then and now, and the sort of hunters now versus then.
There will never be any more hounds like the first Ed Walker hunted, for the very simple reason
that there will never be another hunter like he was. For those who knew him well and hunted with
him as boy and man tell me that twenty-four hours in the woods was not unusual, that he would
starve out any hunter who tried to hunt with him, his horse, and even his hounds. One who knew
him well tells me that of all the times they were in the woods together that he never heard him say
“let’s go home,” or that he was hungry, and only once did he ever see him take a drink of water.
On that occasion they had ridden hard to contact the running hounds, rode into Dick’s River where
the horses drank deep and long, so Mr. Ed, while waiting for his horse to drink took his horn from
around his neck, dipped it into the river and drank from it. Compare that sort of hunter with the
kind you and I are, with our oil roads and cars and sleeping bags. One of my favorite hunting
friends has a trailer that is a complete kitchenette. We cook supper, and then cook breakfast with
eggs and bacon frying and coffee boiling. He told me a few days ago that he always had his hounds
when ready to start home. No wonder, for the smell of that bacon frying on a frosty morning will get
hounds in quicker than a blowing horn. Of course, we can’t have good, game hounds with all that
sort of thing. But that Arbuckes sho’do taste good about sun-up. I often compare my hounds of
today with the first Walkers I owned some forty years ago. At first thought the old ones were much
better, but when I compare the hounds my present pack run against and the pot-lickers of the early
1900’s I realize there is a lot of difference there, too.
The point I am trying to make confuses me, so if any of you discover it I wish you would write and
let me know just what it is. I guess I am trying to say that the reason there are so many sorry,
quitting hounds today is not because of breeding or the bench shows, but because there are so
many sorry hunters, who will drop their hounds out of a car, and after a few hours drive off and
leave them. In all my experience I have never known a sorry hunter to keep good hounds nor a
good hunter to keep sorry ones