The Sonora Filibusters.
[AIR—Ben Bolt.]

Oh, don't you remember Bill Walker, the great,
Bill Walker, the captain of the band,
That went to Sonora to clean out the State,
To take up and knee in the land?
They tore down the flag at the Enseñada Camp,
And hoisted the Star-Spangled Banner,
Which terrified the Greasers, though nothing but fun,
For Walker to scare Santa Anna.

Oh, don't you remember the town of Lopez,
Where Walker commenced his career,
And was shot in the back, so Fred. Emory says,
While stealing a poor Spanish steer?
Lopez still is standing, as filibuster dens,
And each hole and corner is full
Of filibuster thieves that were caught stealing hens,
And others their backs lined with wood.

Oh, don't you remember the ship-loads that went.
In spite of their friend, Uncle Sam,
With knives, guns and pistols, they started h—ll-bent,
For greasers they didn't care a d—n.
But warn't they astonish'd when they heard Sam had bought
Sonora, Chihuahua, and all,
And the "Portsmouth" was coming-to hang all she caught,
So Walker's Republic did fail.

Put's Original California Songster, page 50

Tune and lyrics in Dwyer & Lingenfelter, The Songs of the Gold Rush, p. 148

---

Julius, can you tell me who am de wust folks in de world?
... No, who is de wust folks in de world?
... Why, de candle makers!
... Why so?
'Cause all ob deir works am wick-ed, and all ob deir wick-ed works am brought to light!

---

Click to play (pdmusic.org)

[Tune notes by Artful Codger]
"Ben Bolt, or Oh! Don't You Remember Sweet Alice", text by Dr. Thomas Dunn (1843), music by Nelson A. Kneass (1846). More Maritime Melodies (1894, p. 8) has this to say about it's composition:

It seems that, in 1843, Dr. Thomas Dunn English (now a member of Congress from New jersey) was asked by N. P. Willis to write a sea song for the "New Mirror," which Willis and George P. Morris had just galvanized into life from the corpse of the New York "Mirror." In 1846, a hanger-on of the Pittsburg Theatre gave one Nelson F. Kneass a garbled version of the words of the song, which he had found in an English newspaper, and Kneass set the thing to music and sang it in a play called "The Battle of Buena Vista." The piece traveled with him all over the country, "was picked up by all the minstrel troupes, went to Australia and the Sandwich Isles and wherever the English language was spoken, was sung in London, and had all kinds of parodies and replies among the street ballads of that city." It is said that sixty thousand copies of the music were sold by Peters. Half a dozen other settings were published, but none of them had the popularity of Kneass's air, which was adapted from a German melody, the original of which was afterward published with the same words. The song has had as many claimants as "Beautiful Snow." It is odd that the poem should have made such a tremendous sensation in its day, for the verse is by no means good, and the sentiment is hackneyed and commonplace.

I have not tried to track down the original German melody.

Sheet music [PDF] in the Lester S. Levy Collection.
Digital Tradition: Ben Bolt (chords, but no music)
Mudcat thread: Ben Bolt (includes an earlier setting, with ABC, and more extensive historical notes)
YouTube: unidentified performer with banjo: Ben Bolt
"The Sonora Filibusters" also appears with tune in Lingenfelter, Dwyer and Cohen: Songs of the American West, p. 286.

[Back to Contents]