George Graham Vest: Old Drum, Man's Best Friend, and Guarding Yellowstone

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George Graham Vest was born in Frankfort, Kentucky, in 1830, graduated from Centre College in 1848, and earned his law credentials from Transylvania University in 1853. Bound for California, he stopped in Pettis County, Missouri, and won an acquittal for a young Black man charged with murder, but a mob seized his client and burned him at the stake and threatened Vest. He stayed, settled in Georgetown, and married Sallie Snead in 1854. By 1860 he was in Boonville, a member of the Missouri House and a Democratic presidential elector. He wrote the Vest Resolutions denouncing federal coercion and in October 1861 drafted the ordinance by which the legislature voted to secede.

He served as judge advocate under General Sterling Price, sat in the Confederate House from 1862, and moved to the Confederate Senate in 1865. Back in Sedalia after the war, he took the 1870 trial of Burden v. Hornsby over a foxhound named Old Drum, killed on the land of sheep farmer Leonidas Hornsby, brother-in-law of owner Charles Burden. Vest ignored the evidence and delivered a closing tribute to canine loyalty. Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1879, he served 24 years, fought monopolies in Yellowstone National Park, and died in Sweet Springs on August 9, 1904.

• He promised Burden he would win or apologize to every dog in Missouri.
• His closing contrasted fickle human friends with a dog that guards its master's grave, and the jury awarded $50.
• Hornsby appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court, and Vest won there too.
• A bust of Old Drum stands at the Missouri Supreme Court, and a 1958 statue marks the Warrensburg courthouse.
• From 1882 he required Interior Department contracts in Yellowstone to go to the Senate for review, and he was the last surviving Confederate senator.