Adventure, August 1917 — page 183: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

The Camp-Fire tradition that controls and it is our present undemocratic militia and volunteer system that is responsible. It is the fundamental causes that we should change, but in the meantime I wish the present General Staff could be replaced by such men as Wood and Pershing, who are abreast of the times and not bound up with red-tape. A? TO Congress. At this writing Con- gress has been talking a whole month without finally passing most of the measures most needed. Perhaps our Government would be more efficient if there were less of that most undemocratic procedure called filibustering, if parliamentary law and rules of order played a less important part than fact, reason and national necessity, and if more Congressmen and other national officials thought less about their own private and political interests and more about the interests of the country they are supposed to represent. The spectacle of party lines drawn on matters of national necessity is shameful and sickening. What this country needs is less party and more patriotism. Alt these things are, in the long run, up to you. What will you do about it? ANSWERS to a recent inquiry at our Camp-Fire, and matters that will set a good many to thinking back over the old days of the West. The first came from a town in California and was unsigned: Mr. Frank Houston inquiring about some of the old-timers in the making of the West, as I happen to know some of them I will give him some informa- tion on some of them. i HE first I will mention is Frank Gruard. Last saw him in Sheridan, Wyoming, in the year of 1894. His father, who he had not seen for over thirty years, came and met him in Sheridan. He . got his information through the papers about his son during the Sitting Bull campaign in the nine- ties and I could not say if he is dead or not. As to California Joe, he was assassinated by ——— —— in the year of seventy-six at old Fort Robison, Nebraska. As to Jack Orhomonde, better known as Texas Jack, died in Leadville, Colorado, in the year of seventy-nine. There was another Texas Jack who, with three others, was killed on a creek in the Sioux Reserve about half-way between Fort Pierre, South Dakota, and Deadwood, South Dakota. They were all buried in one grave, killed by In- dians while hunting horses. Calamity Jane, who you have not mentioned, was an old friend of Bill Hikok’s, better known as I8t Wild Bill, and died in Lander, Wyoming. The exact year I do not know, but at her request she was taken to Deadwood and was buried beside Wild Bill.—(Unsigned). I THINK Curley died a few weeks or months ago in peace, in Wyoming or Montana. As to Buffalo Chips, back in the days when Crook and Terry were trying to nip between their several forces the warring Sioux in the Black Hills—and didn’t because the said Sioux cannily slipped out from between—in the following pursuit of them . matters got so strenuous that some of the cavalry had to eat their own horses, which in their rescued moments I believe they furiously denied. How- ever, ultimately they landed heavily on the well- supplied camp of American Horse, finished him in- cidentally, and stocked up on the net proceeds. (No, they didn’t eat him, in spite of his name.) In the subsequent fighting a little knot of heroic war- riors holed in, at the end of a ravine, and stood off the troops for some little time. Buffalo Chips was on the bluff above, trying for a shot. A warrior got his first; after- which the troopers rushed the ravine in white-man style and ended the fight. But Buffalo Chips was dead. You will find a whole chapter of biography about him, and the details of his end (I merely write from memory) in “Campaigning with Crook,” by Cap- tain (now General) Charles King, who was in that war from start to finish and was a close friend of Buffalo Bill’s. Of course he knew “Chips” well. The book may be out of print however, now, and gettable only via advertisement in the Publisher’s Weekly, etc.—JOHN PRESTON TRUE. ‘JIM BAKER and Beckwith died in Colorado, former in the ’90s, latter in the ’60s, I have read. Bill Williams was killed by Indians in the northern part of what is now New Mexico in the ’50s, I have read in a contemporary book. It was stated that he died with his eyes open, and the In- dians were afraid to go close enough to scalp him. King Fisher was killed in a saloon row, I read in a daily paper, in Texas. He was a road agent, I have heard. The death, and date of the same, of Jules Bernard will be found in Mark Twain’s book, “Roughing It.” He was shot by the desperado Slade, later hanged in Montana territory. Jim Bridger died, old and blind, on his little farm in Missouri in 1881. BUFFALO CHIP CHARLIE was killed fighting ~~ the Sioux with Miles at Slim Buttes in Dakota, in 76 or 777. Texas Jack Omohundro died in Colo- rado, and I am informed that he is buried at Colo- rado Springs: Curley, the Crow scout who was the last man to see Custer alive, is still living, I was informed in a letter last Fall. Bob Wright, of Dodge City, Kansas, died last January, and is buried there. Short, a fellow towns- man, died at Fort Worth, Texas, and I presume lies there. He was a noted gun-fighter. Doc Middleton died in Wyoming three years since, and I believe is buried at Casper or Buffalo. His henchman, Kid Wade, was lynched by a mob in Nebraska, in the early days. Captain W. F. Drannan died in Texas two years since. I understand that most of the famous family of the Subletts died from tuberculosis. After Comicldooks.conm