ELLOWSTONE KELLEY. THE MURDER OF BUCK CANNON BY BILL
WOODS. THE SUICIDE OF JACK ZIMICK.
It has now been many years since I quit the range, and as my mind
wanders back over those years as it often does, memories both pleasant
and sad pass in review and it is but fitting that I record a few of them
as a final to the history of my life which has been so full of action,
which is but natural as the men of those days were men of action. They
had to be, and probably their actions were not all good, that I freely
admit, but while that is so, it is equally so that their actions were
not all bad, far from it. And in the history of the frontier there is
recorded countless heroic deeds performed, deeds and actions that
required an iron nerve, self denial in all that these words imply, the
sacrificing of one life to save the life of a stranger or a friend.
Deeds that stamped the men of the western plains as men worthy to be
called men, and while not many of them would shine particularly in the
polite society of today or among the 400 of Gotham, yet they did shine
big and bright in the positions and at a time when men lived and died
for a principle, and in the line of duty. A man who went to the far west
or who claimed it as his home in the early days found there a life far
different from that led by the dude of Fifth Avenue. There a man's work
was to be done, and a man's life to be lived, and when death was to be
met, he met it like a man. It was among such men and surroundings that I
spent so many years of my life and there I met men some of whom are
famous now, while others never lived long enough to reach the pinnacle
of fame, but their memory is held no less sacred by the men who knew
them well.
Some men I met in the cattle country are now known to the world as the
baddest of bad men, yet I have seen these men perform deeds of valor,
self sacrifice and kindness that would cause the deeds recorded as
performed by gentlemen in "ye olden time when knighthood was in flower"
to look insignificant in comparison, and yet these men lay no claim to
the title of gentlemen. They were just plain men.
It was my pleasure to meet often during the early seventies the man who
is now famous in the old world and the new world, Buffalo Bill (William
F. Cody), cowboy, ranger, hunter, scout and showman, a man who carried
his life in his hands day and night in the wild country where duty
called, and has often bluffed the grim reaper Death to a
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