Darlis A. Miller - Captain Jack Crawford: Buckskin Poet, Scout, and Showman

Photograph of Captain Jack Crawford appearing in his first book of poetry, The Poet Scout: Verses and Songs, 1879. (Courtesy Rio Grande Historical Collections, New Mexico State University Library.)

ISBN for this digital edition: 978-0-8263-5190-6

1993 by the University of New Mexico Press.

All rights reserved. First edition

First paperbound printing, 2012

Paperbound ISBN: 978-0-8263-5174-6

The Library of Congress has catalogued the printed edition as follows:

Miller, Darlis A., 1939

Captain Jack Crawfordbuckskin poet, scout, and showman / Darlis A. Miller.1st ed.

p. cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8263-1449-X (cl)

1. Crawford, Jack, 18471917Biography.

2. Poets, American19th centuryBiography.

3. Scouts and ScoutingWest (U.S.)Biography.

4. EntertainersWest (U.S.)Biography. 1. Title.

PS1469.C3Z75 1993

811'.4dc20

[B] 93-8611

CIP

Part of chapter 8 is drawn from Captain Jack Crawford: A Western Military Scout on the Chautauqua Circuit, in South Dakota History 21 No. 3 (Fall 1991) and used courtesy of the journal and editor.

CAPTAIN JACKS NEW MEXICO

In 1861, fourteen-year-old John Wallace Crawford sailed from his native Ireland, with a brother and two sisters, for the United States. His parents had crossed the Atlantic a few years earlier and had established a home in Minersville, Pennsylvania, in the heart of the nations anthracite-coal region. By the time the children reached Minersville, their father had enlisted in the Pennsylvania Ringgold Rifles and was among the first of the Union volunteers mobilized in the Civil War.

Young Johnny soon went to work in the coal mines to help support the family. Thus, the man later known as Captain Jack Crawford, poet, scout, actor, playwright, lecturer, rancher, miner, patriot, and moral crusader, began his working career in the United States as a slate picker, earning a pittance of $1.75 per week. Hundreds of Pennsylvania boys like Crawford spent their days in drudgery, stooping before the chutes amid clouds of suffocating dust, working ten or more hours a day picking slate and other refuse from coal as it moved through the breakers. Crawford was different from the other boys, howevernot in his formal education, for he had none, but in his optimism and determination to make something of himself. Crawford believed in the American Dream, and he never lost faith in that dream even as he approached the end of his life. A man of action, Crawford expected to achieve fame and fortune through hard work and perseverance.

Although his success would never match that of his friend Crawford shared with Buffalo Bill a flare for showmanship, but unlike Cody, he shied away from allowing dime novelists to romanticize his achievements.

Crawford liked adventure, and although he was never foolhardy, he sometimes courted danger. As might be expected, many of his greatest adventures occurred while he was still a young man. At age seventeen, Crawford joined the Forty-eighth Pennsylvania volunteers and saw heavy fighting during the last stages of the Civil War. He was wounded twice, once at Spotsylvania and again at Petersburg, just days before Lees surrender at Appomattox Court House. While convalescing in a Philadelphia hospital from the first wound, young Crawford learned to read and write under the tutelage of a Sister of Charity. The written word seemingly mesmerized the young soldier, and he never escaped from its spell during his lifetime.

Crawfords second great adventure occurred in the Black Hills of the Dakotas in the mid-1870s. He later claimed to have been among the first miners to enter that gold-bearing region, and in 1876 he canvassed the mining camps as a correspondent for the Omaha Daily Bee. Appointed chief of scouts of the Black Hills Rangers, a company organized to protect miners from angry Sioux tribesmen, he was known thereabouts as Captain Jack, a name he forever cherished, even signing letters to his children, Your affectionate daddy, Capt. Jack. After Custer was killed on the Little Bighorn, Crawford joined General George Crooks command as a military scout. In September 1876, Crawford endured the memorable trek known as the starvation march, for as rations gave out the men subsisted on horsemeat. He later played a major role in the Battle of Slim Buttes, near present-day Reva, South Dakota.

At the end of Crooks summer campaign against the Sioux, Crawford joined Buffalo Bill in touring the country, performing on the stage in western melodramas. After appearing together in Virginia City, Nevada, the two showmen separated, and Crawford formed his own dramatic company. But, in 1878, the lure of adventure drew him to the Cariboo gold mines in British Columbia. Failing to find fortune, he returned to the American Southwest to engage in yet another adventure, serving as a military scout in the 1880 Victorio campaign.

Eighteen years later, the fifty-one-year-old Crawford embarked on his last major adventure when he joined the gold rush to the Klondike in the Canadian Northwest. During the intervening years Crawford had compiled a remarkable record. He made a home for his family at Fort Craig, New Mexico, 110 miles south of Albuquerque, where he served as post trader for four years. He also established ranches and worked several mining claims in the nearby mountains; and he served a four-year term as a special agent for the Justice Department, tracking down whiskey dealers selling liquor illegally to American Indians. At the same time, Crawford pursued literary and theatrical fame. During his lifetime he published seven books of poetry and more than one hundred stories, and he copyrighted four plays. He spent the last years of his life in the public spotlight, touring the country as a popular lecturer. His goal was not only to entertain but also to educate Americans about the true nature of their frontier heritage. Yet in telling his stories, Crawford romanticized the West, creating in the minds of his audience a West of mythical proportions.

Crawford lived in exciting times, witnessing several momentous events that changed the very fabric of American society. He saw railroads span the continent, with streams of emigrants flowing west in their wake. He participated in the great Indian campaigns that hastened the removal of Native Americans to reservations. He witnessed the closing of the frontier and the emergence of an industrial society, with complex social and economic problems. Electric lights, telephones, automobiles, motion pictures, and airplanes all appeared during Crawfords lifetime. In his sixty-eighth year, Crawford even played a minor role in a movie that stressed military preparedness. He died one month before the United States entered World War I in 1917; had he lived, he would have cheered Wilsons decision to send troops to Europe.