fisticuffing

“He recalled its “desperate reputation” in the steamboating days of his youth—“plenty of drinking, carousing, fisticuffing, and killing there, among the riff-raff of the river, in those days.””

Simon & Schuster: Mark Twain

“A dozen men are manning the oars, battling with the tempest, fighting through the long hours of the night with the storm-whipped sea, fisticuffing with death, and yet getting nowhere.”

Sermons on Biblical Characters

“You should have had some fighters over from London or Rotterdam, then there would have been some pretty fisticuffing if you like—blows that could have been heard out on the Place.”

IV. Master Jacques Coppenole. Book I

“Six men were under sentence for simple assault and battery – mere fisticuffing – one of two years, two of five years, one of six years, one of seven and one of eight.”

The Reason Why the Colored American is not in the World's Columbian Exposition: The Afro-American's Contribution to Columbian Literature

“In the midst of this were two figures, busily engaged in the cheerful occupation of fisticuffing each other till the stronger might win.”

Five Little Peppers at School

“It had a desperate reputation, morally, in the old keel-boating and early steamboating times -- plenty of drinking, carousing, fisticuffing, and killing there, among the riff-raff of the river, in those days.”

Life on the Mississippi

“Nor did the unruly, disorderly African character ever show itself, as formerly it often did, by fisticuffing, hair-pulling, and cursing, with a mixture of English and Dark-Continent ideas and phraseology, whose _tout ensemble_ was really portentous.”

To the Gold Coast for Gold A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Volume I

“One can hardly be ingenuous enough to consider all this dirking, battering, and fisticuffing as the legitimate and healthy outcome of a difference as to the knotty point whether all men might or might not be saved by repentance and faith in Christ.”

Life and Death of John of Barneveld, Advocate of Holland : with a view of the primary causes and movements of the Thirty Years' War, 1617

“We had "gouging," biting, fisticuffing, and "stamping" in the most "scientific" perfection; some even fired guns and pistols at each other, but these weapons were mostly harmless in the unsteady hands which employed them.”

Townsend Chapter 7