This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. Surnames: Dillenbeck, Wood, Gillespie, Rawlins Classification: Query Message Board URL: http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/msg/an/Zk.2ADE/957 Message Board Post: Nashua Reporter (Nashua, Iowa) 1899 > July > 13 At Bassett, Ia., July 4th, at 10:30 at night, while a party of men and boys were having a little blow-out in front of C.H. Dillenbeck's store, Harry Wood, a stone mason by trade, insane from drink, came running up the street with a loaded shot gun. He fired once and the gun was wrested from him and hidden. Rushing into the store he grabbed a giant cracker and would have lit it by the lamp had Dillenbeck not pushed him away, but light it he did on the store porch, but Dillenbeck jumped and succeeded in making him throw it away just as it exploded with an awful report. Just at this moment M.F. Lighthall had lighted one up a little farther up the street. With a scream like a maniac Wood jumped and grabbed the lighted giant cracker, though they all shouted and Dillenbeck commanded him to let alone, and with an oath and yell he raised it above his head, and before anyone had time to interfere there was an explosion, and as he staggered toward the light only the stub of the wr! ist could be seen with blood spurting from every pore. Dillenbeck grasped his arm with a vice-like grasp and held him until Dr. Gillespie got there and bound it up. But a short time elapsed after he was taken home before Drs. Rawlins and Gillespie had everything made ready, and this drunken man, a victim of his own folly, was laid on a table[,] chloroform administered, and the arm amputated below the elbow. Mr. Wood spent a sorrowful Fourth, as well as his striken [sic] wife and family. In fact this awful accident has cast a gloom over the whole community. Yet no one can attach any blame except to those "who furnish their neighbors drink."