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I first read about James Merry and the bull in that interesting book, The Saga of Cape Ann, by Melvin T. Copeland and the late Elliott C. Rogers.
James Merry, as they told it, was a young Gloucesterman who had taken in the bullfights and had met a few matadors on a visit to Spain when he sailed before the mast in a salt ship. Back home he made such a big deal out of the bull ring that his friends dared him to demonstrate.
So Merry, who was six feet seven and weighed 250 pounds, took them up to a pasture on Dogtown Common, picked out a bull calf and threw it to the ground several times with no great trouble. Next year the bull was three years old and a lot bigger. On his first try Merry had to be rescued.
A few weeks later, on the morning of September 10, 1892, he went up alone for a private rematch. When he hadn't returned, neighbors searched and found his body in the pasture, the rocks all bloody where he had been tossed against them, and the bull grazing calmly nearby.
That's the Saga's version.
My next encounter with this curious story was in Maximus Poems IV, V, VI, by Gloucester's late poet Charles Olsen, who was himself six feet eight, I think, and who made a gutsy epic of it in Maximus, from Dogtown - I. Olsen pictured Merry as a braggart on a Saturday night drunk, boasting to a barroom gang in Gloucester that he'd show 'em Sunday morning, and then staggering up there alone that night to see for himself first if he could put the bull down...
the baby bull
now full grown
waiting,
not even knowing
death
was in his power over
this man who lay
in the Sunday morning sun
like smoked fish
in the same field..
I obtained from Mrs. Helen Rogers of Annisquam the source of her husband's story, and obviously Olsen's, an article by Richard B. Fisher dated February 12, 1955. Fisher claimed that Merry actually had bought the bull calf for the purpose of wrestling it, practiced throwing it every night, and put on a scheduled exhibition that summer, the first of many, dressed in a makeshift matador's costume. The next winter he kept the growing bull in his barn, put it out to pasture again in the spring, and on the morning of September 10, trying to overcome the humility of his defeat a few weeks earlier, rassled the bull after fortifying himself with a few whiskies, and lost.
Fisher's article mentioned that inscriptions had been carved on a couple of the bloody boulders to mark the tragedy, so I hiked up Dogtown Road one morning to seek out the place. The fatal pasture is across the road from boulder 18, according to the late Roger Babson's system of numbering the old cellar holes, and after some searching I found the rather shallow carvings in the rocks.
Not far from the road the first is indistinct but legible:
JAS. MERRY
DIED
SEPT. 18 1892
Not September 10, as Fisher had stated. Fifteen paces in, on another:
FIRST
ATTACKED
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Back of this second rock is one of the homilies Babson enjoyed having engraved in big block letters on the rocks of Dogtown - the location of it being grimly coincidental, I'm sure, because I don't believe he was aware of the Merry story: NEVER TRY, NEVER WIN
It had occurred to no one, apparently, to check the newspapers. I found the account on page one of the Gloucester Daily Times of Monday, September 19, 1892, substantially as follow:
Some men passing Patrick Nugent's pasture in Dogtown Sunday spotted blood on the horn of his bull and found the gored body of James Merry nearby. There was blood on a rock. He had left his Cleveland Street home in the morning to pick berries. The dead man was sixty years old, a former fisherman and railroad worker. He stood six feet three and in his prime was considered one of the strongest men in town. He had a reputation as a quiet and peaceable person. He had been in the pasture on previous occasions with Nugent.
Patrick Nugent claimed in the newspaper that his bull was likewise peaceful, though there was some difference of opinion among others interviewed and he killed it.
So I contacted John Nugent of 26 Warner Street in Gloucester, a grandson of Patrick Nugent. He said his grandfather came to Boston from Ireland in 1876, wound up in Gloucester dairy farming and raised thirteen children. He had been told in the family, he said, that his grandfather owned the bull, but the pasture was Curtis's ... that Merry had been up there "hazing" the creature, and that Pat had warned him repeatedly not to mess with it.
Finally I paid a visit on my old friend James P. Nugent of 14 Marble Street in East Gloucester, Pat Nugent's son, and here is his version:
"Jim Merry had been down at Howard Blackburn's saloon that Saturday night with the bunch and somebody said that Johnny Carter over to Squam had taken a calf by the tail and tossed it over the Squam bridge. Merry was a helluva strong man all right. They'd fill a wheelbarrow with weights and he'd snap the handles off picking it up.
"Well, next morning Merry told his wife he was going up to Dogtown berrying, but when he got there he took off his boots and left his bucket by the stone wall and went into Curtis's pasture and tackled my father's bull.
"A couple of men walking by later in the day saw the bull with the blood on him, and Jim Merry lying by the boulder. Seems he'd grabbed the bull by the horns and tried to twist it around that way to throw it, and the bull gored him straight through the heart.
"When they came and told my father _'Pat, your bull just killed a man!' he took a pitchfork and went up with another feller. The bull was grazing there. My father called out - "Jack!' - and the bull looked up, and he stuck him through the eye with the fork"
October 7, 1972
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