Last of the Great Scouts | Page 4

the daring."
The public knows my brother as boy Indian-slayer, a champion
buffalo-hunter, a brave soldier, a daring scout, an intrepid frontiersman,
and a famous exhibitor. It is only fair to him that a glimpse be given of
the parts he played behind the scenes--devotion to a widowed mother,
that pushed the boy so early upon a stage of ceaseless action, continued
care and tenderness displayed in later years, and the generous
thoughtfulness of manhood's prime.
Thus a part of my pleasant task has been to enable the public to see my
brother through his sister's eyes--eyes that have seen truly if kindly. If I
have been tempted into praise where simple narrative might to the
reader seem all that was required, if I have seemed to exaggerate in any
of my history's details, I may say that I am not conscious of having set
down more than "a plain, unvarnished tale." Embarrassed with riches of
fact, I have had no thought of fiction. H. C. W.
CODYVIEW, DULUTH, MINNESOTA, February 26, 1899.

LAST OF THE GREAT SCOUTS.

CHAPTER I
.
THE OLD HOMESTEAD IN IOWA.
A PLEASANT, roomy farm-house, set in the sunlight against a
background of cool, green wood and mottled meadow-- this is the
picture that my earliest memories frame for me. To this home my
parents, Isaac and Mary Cody, had moved soon after their marriage.
The place was known as the Scott farm, and was situated in Scott
County, Iowa, near the historic little town of Le Clair, where, but a few
years before, a village of the Fox Indians had been located; where
Black Hawk and his thousand warriors had assembled for their last
war-dance; where the marquee of General Scott was erected, and the
treaty with the Sacs and Foxes drawn up; and where, in obedience to
the Sac chief's terms, Antoine Le Clair, the famous half-breed Indian
scholar and interpreter, had built his cabin, and given to the place his
name. Here, in this atmosphere of pioneer struggle and Indian
warfare--in the farm-house in the dancing sunshine, with the
background of wood and meadow--my brother, William Frederick
Cody, was born, on the 26th day of February, 1846.
Of the good, old-fashioned sort was our family, numbering five
daughters and two sons--Martha, Samuel, Julia, William, Eliza, Helen,
and May. Samuel, a lad of unusual beauty of face and nature, was
killed through an unhappy accident before he was yet fourteen.
He was riding "Betsy Baker," a mare well known among old settlers in
Iowa as one of speed and pedigree, yet displaying at times a most
malevolent temper, accompanied by Will, who, though only seven
years of age, yet sat his pony with the ease and grace that distinguished
the veteran rider of the future. Presently Betsy Baker became fractious,
and sought to throw her rider. In vain did she rear and plunge; he kept
his saddle. Then, seemingly, she gave up the fight, and Samuel cried, in
boyish exultation:
"Ah, Betsy Baker, you didn't quite come it that time!"
His last words! As if she knew her rider was a careless victor off his
guard, the mare reared suddenly and flung herself upon her back,
crushing the daring boy beneath her.

Though to us younger children our brother Samuel was but a shadowy
memory, in him had centered our parents' fondest hopes and aims.
These, naturally, were transferred to the younger, now the only son, and
the hope that mother, especially, held for him was strangely stimulated
by the remembrance of the mystic divination of a soothsayer in the
years agone. My mother was a woman of too much intelligence and
force of character to nourish an average superstition; but prophecies
fulfilled will temper, though they may not shake, the smiling unbelief
of the most hard-headed skeptic. Mother's moderate skepticism was not
proof against the strange fulfillment of one prophecy, which fell out in
this wise:
To a Southern city, which my mother visited when a girl, there came a
celebrated fortune-teller, and led by curiosity, my mother and my aunt
one day made two of the crowd that thronged the sibyl's
drawing-rooms.
Both received with laughing incredulity the prophecy that my aunt and
the two children with her would be dead in a fortnight; but the dread
augury was fulfilled to the letter. All three were stricken with yellow
fever, and died within less than the time set. This startling confirmation
of the soothsayer's divining powers not unnaturally affected my
mother's belief in that part of the prophecy relating to herself that "she
would meet her future husband on the steamboat by which she expected
to return home; that she would be married to him in a year, and bear
three sons, of whom only the second would live, but that the