Old Drum: The Dog America Never Forgot

On the night of October 28, 1869, Charles Burden heard a gunshot somewhere in the distance near his farm in Johnson County, Missouri. He called for his dogs and waited for them to return. All of them eventually came home except one: his favorite hunting hound, Old Drum.

Burden went looking for him and found Drum dead near Big Creek, not far from the property of his neighbor and brother-in-law, Leonidas Hornsby. The dog had been shot.

It might have ended there. In rural Missouri in 1869, the death of a hunting dog was hardly an event destined for the history books. Dogs were legally regarded as property, yet Burden wasn't willing to dismiss the loss simply because the law could assign a dollar value to the animal he loved. He took his brother-in-law to court. What followed became one of the most unusual cases in Missouri history and eventually inspired a speech about dogs that has survived for more than 150 years.

A Fight Over One Dog

Hornsby had been losing sheep and had made it known that dogs threatening his livestock could be killed. On the night Drum disappeared, Hornsby's nephew, Samuel "Dick" Ferguson, had fired at a dog at Hornsby's direction. The dispute was whether that dog was Drum.

Burden believed it was. What began as a small claim for damages turned into years of litigation involving conflicting witnesses, multiple trials and appeals. Burden won an early judgment only to have it overturned, but he continued pursuing the case.

In September 1870, the dispute reached another trial in Warrensburg. Among the lawyers representing Burden was George Graham Vest, a Missouri attorney who would later serve for more than two decades in the United States Senate. Vest faced a fairly ordinary legal question: Who was responsible for killing the dog, and what was the dog worth? Instead of limiting his closing argument to those questions, he spoke about something considerably harder to measure. He spoke about the relationship between a person and a dog.

The surviving portion of his argument became known as the "Eulogy of the Dog." Vest described how fortunes disappear, reputations crumble and even people we once trusted can abandon us. Against all of that uncertainty, he placed the constancy of a dog.

"The one absolutely unselfish friend that man can have in this selfish world," Vest told the jury," is his dog."

The jury awarded Burden $50. Hornsby appealed again, and in 1872 the Supreme Court of Missouri affirmed the judgment. Legally, Charles Burden had won a case about property. History remembered something very different.

The Dog Who Outlived the Lawsuit

Old Drum's story could have disappeared with the lawsuit, but it didn't. In 1947, a memorial was placed near where he had been found. Eleven years later, a bronze statue of Drum was erected outside the Johnson County Courthouse in Warrensburg. In 2017, Missouri officially designated him its State Historical Dog.

In 1947, a memorial was placed near where he had been found, built with stones sent by dog lovers from around the world, including pieces from the Great Wall of China, the White Cliffs of Dover and places across Europe, Africa and the Americas. Eleven years later, a bronze statue of Drum was erected outside the Johnson County Courthouse in Warrensburg. In 2017, Missouri officially designated him its State Historical Dog.

There is no known authenticated photograph of Old Drum. We don't know where he slept, how he greeted Burden at the end of the day or any of the little habits that made him his dog. Yet more than 150 years later, we still know his name.

That may be the most remarkable part of the story. Old Drum wasn't famous while he was alive. He didn't rescue anyone from a burning building or perform some extraordinary feat. He was simply loved enough that when his life was taken, one man refused to behave as though that life had meant nothing. More than 150 years later, that still makes perfect sense to anyone who has truly loved a dog.

What a Dog Is Worth

We spend much of our lives assigning value to things. We know what our houses cost, what our cars are worth and what our jobs pay. Our days become organized around deadlines, obligations and whatever we're supposed to accomplish next. Then a dog comes into the middle of it all with an entirely different understanding of what matters.

Your dog doesn't care about your title, your bank account or whether somebody else thinks you're successful. He knows the sound of your car pulling into the driveway. He knows your footsteps. He knows when something about you isn't right, sometimes before you've admitted it yourself.

We believe dogs are among God's great gifts to us, and perhaps part of that gift is their ability to reach places in the human soul that other people sometimes cannot. They don't require explanations before sitting beside us. They don't care about our failures or what version of ourselves the world sees. They simply meet us where we are.

Dogs have carried people through grief, heartbreak, addiction, loss, loneliness and periods of life they weren't sure they could survive. They don't make those things disappear, but their presence can reach wounds another person may never touch. There is something almost magical about that bond. Science can explain pieces of it, but perhaps not everything meaningful was meant to fit neatly into words. The difficult part of this gift is that we almost always outlive them.

 When they're young, there seem to be thousands of walks ahead. Then the muzzle turns gray and somehow the years we thought we had in abundance become precious. All the while, life keeps giving us reasons to postpone the ordinary things: work to finish, messages to answer, somewhere else we're supposed to be.

So take the longer walk. Leave work early sometimes and take your dog somewhere he loves. Go for the drive without needing a reason. Stay home and watch a movie with your dog asleep beside you. You are not missing out on life.

Some of its richest parts are the ordinary ones nobody else will ever see. Anyone who has lost a dog knows what they would give to hear those nails crossing the floor again, feel that familiar weight on the couch or have one more unremarkable afternoon together.

A Missouri court once had to decide what Old Drum was worth because that was the question the law knew how to ask. Charles Burden understood the inadequacy of that question long before the rest of America knew his dog's name. A judgment could account for the loss of property, but it could never account for the loss of his dog.

Most of our dogs will never have statues outside courthouses or their names preserved in state archives. Their legacy is far more personal. It lives in the people they comforted, the homes they changed, the difficult years they made bearable and the pieces of ourselves they somehow helped put back together.

Old Drum's story began because one man believed his dog mattered enough to fight for. More than a century and a half later, perhaps his story leaves us with something much simpler:

Love them enough to make time for them while they're still here. The work will still be there tomorrow. Your dog won't always be.

Take the walk.

🍑 Now go Eat The Peaches Out Of Life! Your dog's already doing it!