Samuel Hildebrand is said to have told those who wrote his autobiography for him, If the strange hallucination should ever enter the mind of a man that I could be captured, let him immediately send for a physician, to have his head emptied and filled up with clabber to give him a better set of brains.
Samuel Hildebrand was a Civil War bushshacker who kept at it after the conflict ended. He supposedly said, I was annoyed beyond all measure by the reflection that the war had suddenly ceased before I was done fighting. I cared not so much for the general result…the practical question with me was whether all the
scoundrels in the nation were killed off or not. As far as my knowledge extended, the war had only
gobbled up about one-tenth of them. Samuel Hildebrand was an illiterate southeast Missouri farmer, a pig rustler who also supplied horses to the Confederates when the war began. His alleged autobiography uses some words one would not expect of an illiterate.
