The three men who had thus made a miraculous escape from the savage foe, remained all night in quiet possession of the cabin, and in the morning returned to the station with their trophies. Whenever the three heroes met in after life they laughed over their strange deliverance, and what they called "The Battle of the Boards."
George Dennison Prentice, poet, editor, wit, and founder of the _Journal School of Female Poets_, was born at Preston, Connecticut, December 18, 1802. In the fall of 1820 Prentice entered the Sophomore class of Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, where one of his instructors was Horace Mann, and among his classmates was Samuel G. Howe. At college he was famous for his prodigious memory. Prentice was graduated from Brown in 1823, after which he taught school for some time. He next turned to the law, but this he also abandoned to enter upon his life work--journalism. In 1827 he became editor of a paper in New London, Connecticut, but in the following year he went to Hartford to take charge of the _New England Review_, which "was the Louisville _Journal_, born in Connecticut." In 1830 the Connecticut Whigs requested Prentice to journey to Kentucky and prepare a campaign life of Henry Clay. He finally decided to do this, naming John Greenleaf Whittier, the good Quaker poet, as his successor in the editorial chair of _The Review_, and setting out at once upon his long pilgrimage to Lexington. He dashed off his biography of the statesman in a few months, and it greatly pleased the Whigs of his State, but Prentice had decided to remain in Kentucky. He went to Louisville, and on November 24, 1830, the first issue of the _Louisville Journal_ appeared, and George D. Prentice had at last come into his very own. His pungent paragraphs made the "Yankee schoolmaster" feared by editors in the remotest corners of the country, but more especially by Shadrach Penn, editor of the _Louisville Advertiser_, the Democratic organ, as the _Journal_ was the Whig organ. After a constant warfare of more than ten years, poor Penn capitulated, and removed to Missouri. Prentice found another foe worthy of his steel in John H. Harney, editor of the Louisville _Daily Democrat_, but the battle of the wits between them was not as keen as it was between him and Penn. Prentice survived both editors and wrote exquisite eulogies upon them! He also had many personal encounters, which his biographer, Mr. John James Piatt, the Ohio poet, declines to dignify with the term of "duel." His pistol "brush" with Col Reuben T. Durrett, the Kentucky historical writer and collector, was, perhaps, his most serious affair. And the colonel lived to write a fine tribute to him, which was turning the tables upon him just a bit! Prentice's home in Louisville was the center of the city's literary life for many years. His wife was a charming and cultured woman, in every way fitted to assist him. A volume of his witty paragraphs, called by the publishers, _Prenticeana_ (New York, 1859), attracted attention in London and Paris, and in all parts of the United States. Next to Whig politics, the _Journal_ was the literary newspaper of the country. All Western and Southern poets were welcomed to its columns, particularly were female poets "featured," and upon them all Prentice poured out indiscriminate praise, which may or may not have been good for them or for the public. At any rate, he never failed to send a kindly letter to each new "discovery," in which their work already submitted was extravagantly valued, and in which they were urged to flood the office with more of the same kind. His praise of Amelia B. Welby, the sentimental singer of the long ago, seems indefensible to-day. As a poet himself Prentice was a master of blank verse forms. Mr. Piatt put him next to Bryant among American poets in the handling of this difficult measure. _The Closing Year_, written in 1835, is undoubtedly his finest poem; and _At My Mother's Grave_ is usually set beside it. Although his sons, wife, and most of his friends sympathized with the South in the war of Sections, Prentice was always an ardent advocate of the Union cause. He died near Louisville, on the banks of the Ohio river, January 22, 1870. Henry Watterson delivered an eulogy upon him, and snugly adjusted his mantle about his own shoulders.