CAPTAIN JACK
J.W. Crawford

During his time, J.W. Crawford was known as one of the outstanding scouts in United States History. He was with Crook's army in the Indian campaigns of 1876-77, and had many a hair-breadth escape from Indian war-party attacks when on duty carrying dispatches - from the front to the supply bases - from fort to fort, and once he carried the dispatch of General Crook from the battlefields of Slim Buttes in the badlands of what is now North Dakota, to Ft. Laramie in southern Wyoming, in a day-and-night ride through the most dangerous section in all the troubled Indian country. This was one of the noted and daring incidents of the Sioux War years.

It was in this barren and desolate district that Crook's starving troopers caught up with Crazy Horse and his starving band of exhausted warriors with their women and children; these poor red families had been trailed for weeks by an army little better off than were the natives they followed. The Indians were a remnant of the tribes who had been in the buffalo ranges of Powder River hunting; they had left he reservation because they had not been provided for - and were facing starvation. They went to their own hunting country - that which had been set apart to them by treaty - a district where the army had no legal right to interfere with them. Crook had been ordered to round them up and bring them back to the reservation - kill them if they objected. But Crazy Horse was not the kind to surrender and did not surrender at Slim Buttes, even though he was taken by surprise when Crook attacked his suffering followers there.

During the affray, one of his sub-chiefs, the noted American Horse, with his wife and other women and children of his camp, took refuge in a sort of cave in a deep ravine bordering the fighting ground. They had been observed going into the cavern by some troopers. They at once began firing into this opening, amongst the women and children and kept it up incessantly. As they got no apparent result, they advanced nearer and called on the refugees to come out and surrender; no answer coming, firing was renewed, and again the call to surrender was sent. American Horse staggered out, holding his carbine butt-end forward, in his right hand, while with his left he pressed his abdomen to restrain protruding entrails from the ragged wound made by one of the white man's bullets. They took his gun as he lay down on a robe to sob out his life among the officers. His squaw had tied her shawl around the chief in her crude effort to relieve his distress but soon she was put to rest in like manner, along with several more women and children, as was discovered when the cave was examined.

And when it was all over, - sad and inhuman as well as unjustified and disgraceful as it was, Crook sent Crawford to the Fort with telegrams to his commander and to the New York papers announcing the winning of a great battle. On one of his many visits to the Wigwam, the writer asked Crawford to relate the exact details of his observations at Slim Butte battle. He declined: said it was something he neither wanted to discuss or to hear of; he said it hurt him even to have to think about it.

Crawford was known, perhaps, more widely as the "Poet Scout" than as an Indian trailer. He lectured over a great part of the United States and recited his own poems at every appearance. He was popular as an entertainer, and, like his compeer Cody, knew most of the noted people of his generation, yet there existed a sort of secret jealousy toward each other. This became clear when either visited the Wigwam and in conversations the name of the other was mentioned. Neither thought sincerely well of the other, - yet never spoke disparagingly - out loud on the subject. Both were famous men!

Crawford's book of poems was published by Elbert Hubbard and his scattered writings - mostly verse - were widely printed in papers and magazines of the time. When Mark Twain died, he wrote verses on it, the original of which he sent to the writer, - and to it the writer responded in verse. Both were published by him, and often he quoted them in his lecture entertainments. In 1903 he sent an original six-line verse inscribed on the bottom of his big color portrait. It was his means of sending congratulations to a father of twins. It hangs in the writer's den alongside of one from Thomas A. Edison and near to one of Luther Burbank, both bearing their autographs in like manner. One of his poems, he always recited when with the writer at the Wigwam, was "Where the Hand of God is Seen" - written while in the mountains of New Mexico - and it was one of the best he ever wrote. Many of his unpublished poems are in the files of the Wigwam and in scrapbooks, likely never to appear in print. His old life is gone, - there will be no more scouts like him.