It was very busy times along there for a while.

It appeared certain that we must perish, but even that was not the bitterest thought; no, the abjectly unheroic nature of the death--that was the sting--that and the bizarre wording of the resulting obituary: "SHOT WITH A ROCK, ON A RAFT." There would be no poetry written about it.

None COULD be written about it.

Example: NOT by war's shock, or war's shaft,--SHOT, with a rock, on a raft.
No poet who valued his reputation would touch such a theme as that.

I should be distinguished as the only "distinguished dead" who went down to the grave unsonneted, in 1878.
But we escaped, and I have never regretted it.