Tiger Kilgore Swam the Big Muddy in 1865

When I was in Georgia a couple of weeks ago, I visited a cemetery in Chatsworth, Georgia where I understood that a number of Kilgores, to whom I am related, were buried. I ran into an older fellow there who told me he was also kin to the Kilgores, and we compared notes. It turned out we were third cousins once removed and descendants of Abner Kilgore.

He related a family legend about an uncle Samuel Marion “Tiger” Kilgore who had had to swim across the Mississippi River to escape Union soldiers. He tired and resigned himself to drowning only to find that he was on a sand bar and in less than two feet of water. He was able to rest and wade out of the river. He was so elated that he had not drowned that he made quite a ruckus. His companions said they thought a tiger was coming through the woods, and this is how he got his nickname.

I had heard a family legend from my grandfather about an uncle of his who had a similar experience swimming the Mississippi, but I never knew which uncle he was talking about until I ran into that fellow in the cemetery. There were some differences in the story, most notably that he was returning from the Transmississippi at the end of the War Between the States, that he had had to walk from Texas to his home in Georgia.

I love agood family legend as much as the next guy, but I am a little skeptical about the part of the story where Tiger’s traveling companions thought a tiger was approaching. As far as I know, there have never been any tigers in North America outside of zoos since the Pleistocene. Moreover, whoops of joy do not approximate the roar of a tiger, even assuming that former Confederate soldiers knew what a tiger sounded like. Samuel Marion probably got his nickname in some other, more humiliating context and later tried to attach it to his adventures in the WBTS.