Pals of Four Wars Come Back to U. S.

1919

Wyoming Cattlemen Say They Are Ready at Country's Call Again.

NEW YORK, N. Y. — Two seasoned American warriors from Wyoming, ranchmen and veterans of four wars who never got a scratch in a battle, altho they fought in many, arrived here from Havre on the French liner La Lorraine.

They had been friends for 22 years, and whenever there was a real war under way they turned their ranches over to foremen and took chances on the firing line.

The last fight that brought them together was the great war. Their unit was the 148th field artillery, made up of the Third Wyoming infantry.

These two soldier-rangers are Capt. W. E. Jackson of Wheatland and Capt. W. P. O. Grote of Jackson. Capt. Grote's ranch lies up in the northwestern part of the State, just below the Yellowstone, and that of Capt. Jackson stretches along the Platte River in the southeast corner of the State.

They saw service together in the Philippines, in the Boxer uprising and in the Boer war in South Africa.

Wireless bulletins of the strained relations between the United States and Mexico aroused their interest at sea, and they announced they would go over the border if Uncle Sam needed them.

—The Saturday Blade, Chicago, Jan. 3, 1920, p. 5.

Forcing Port Arthur Gate

1905

One hour before midnight you could see once more the same men who had applied the explosives in the day making for their victim. The foundation of the caponiere was made of concrete, sand and steel plates. It could turn the largest and most powerful shells ever manufactured by men into a loud and foolish joke. The men carried this time a large quantity of gunpowder. This they applied to the cracks made by the former explosion.

The white heat fuse was applied. The report certainly handled the serene silence of the midnight without mercy, tore it into pieces. This time there was a large rent made in the wall. Night, once more, rocked the confusion back to peace and there came into the rent a number of Russian heads. Some of us laughed. Quick as a flash the rifles of our men greeted them. Wide as the rent was, it was not quite sufficient for men in haste to pass, and for the third time we made the preparation of explosives. At 14 minutes past 4, in the still dark hours of the 28th, the earth about us shuddered as it had never shuddered before, and we saw a hole in the wall that was over one meter in width and considerably over one meter in height.

Through this hole our engineer threw in over twelve sacks of explosives. The caponiere was choked with fume and smoke. The ash gray of the breaking day and the most sinister gray of the smoke from the explosives creeking like cowardly ghosts from the hole in the wall was broken by silvery flashes here and there. They were the icy blades of our men rushing into the caponiere through the confusion of the explosion. A crash of arms, groans, sounds of failing bodies, of broken steel, shrieks with which the life flew away from the clay, all mingled and melted in a confusion far beyond pen and brush. A few moments later the sun-round flag waved from out of a torn hole over the covered caponiere a welcome to the new-born day. — Leslie's Monthly.

Wikipedia: Port Arthur, Manchuria. 1904, the starting battle of the Russo-Japanese War.

This Swindler Outdoes Fiction

1908

Pittsburg Society Folk Are Victims of Alleged Remarkable Crook

Pittsburg. — A career more extraordinary than half the villains of fiction is charged against Reginald Spauldlng, or Oscar F. Spate, or George Frederick Spate, the man who proposed to introduce Pittsburg people of wealth at the court of St. James in exchange for Pittsburg money.

Pittsburgers who wined and dined Spaulding a few days ago will be horrified when they learn that he is said to have been a convict in South Africa, but they can take some consolation out of another report that he is a son-in-law of Lady Suffield, the woman who, he asserted, would bring about the introductions at the court of St. James. It is charged against the prisoner that he sold his noble wife a "salted" mine and then abandoned her in the interior of South Africa.

The Pittsburg police received a letter from Inspector McCafferty of the New York police department containing a report which one of the New York detectives made on Spaulding. The report follows:

"Spate is the same man whom I met in Cape Town, South Africa, at the Mount Nelson hotel. He advertised there for men to act as agents for the American Trading company. They were to go into the interior of South Africa and collect hides and ivory from the natives, which they were to ship to various points. These agents were required to deposit £100 in money to secure the position.

"He collected the amount from many young men. This was in March, 1903. He was arrested while boarding the steamer Walmer Castle for England. He was convicted and served for two years in the government prison. He was also at Johannesburg, South Africa, and tried to secure a franchise from the park commissioners to put benches in Joubert park, but was refused."

Simultaneously with this report, a communication reached the Pittsburg police from a source which they will not divulge to the effect that Spaulding under the name of George Fredrick Spate in 1902, was married to Muriel, daughter of Lord and Lady Suffield, who left her home in London because of a difference with her parents, and went to South Africa during the Boer war as a Red Cross nurse, in consequence her parents disowned her, and her name was removed from the records of the British nobility.

It is claimed Spate is a younger son of a noble English family.

He secured a subaltern berth in the English army and fought in South Africa during the Boer war.

It was while he was wandering about South Africa that he is alleged to have married the daughter of Lord and Lady Suffield. Spate is alleged to have interested his wife in a diamond mine which he had "salted" and finally sold the mine to her and some others for a large sum.

Before the discovery was made that the mine was "salted," Spate is said to have taken his wife into the interior of Africa, where he deserted her in the land of the Zulu chief, Mosilikaps.

He returned to Johannesburg, where he circulated a story to the effect that his wife had been killed by the natives. Spate then started to organize a new Zulu kingdom, with himself as chief, with the purported object of going into the land of Mosilikaps and avenging the death of his wife. Just about this time, however, the woman appeared at Johannesburg.

Pawnee Rock in Kansas

1900

Historic Indian Battle Spot Disappearing Year After Year

Nine miles northeast of Larned, Kansas, is a low, disintegrating pile of red sandstone, which is all that is now left of the once imposing Pawnee Rock.

This rock, which received its name from the tribe of Indians known as the Pawnees, has an interesting history — a history acquired during the time when this part of the country was a wild and dreary desert, inhabited only by the Indians and herds of roaming buffalo. On this rock have been waged many bloody conflicts between the Indians and travelers of the famous Santa Fe trail, and also between the different tribes of plains Indians. Surrounded by vast prairies with the trail running along its base, it afforded a good hiding place and battle ground for the savages.

In its primitive state Pawnee Rock rose to a considerable height, and from its summit a beautiful panorama spread before the lover of nature, and even now, from its reduced height, can be seen for miles a widespread landscape. Comparatively little remains to be seen of that once imposing promontory of the Kansas "desert," for the hand of man has done more in twenty years to efface it from the earth than the elements in centuries of time.

The material obtained by the destruction of this landmark of the early days, is used in the construction of dwellings, bridges, etc., by the inhabitants in the fertile valleys surrounding this spot.


Unlimited Possibilities

Chicago remarks that at her present rate of increase she will outstrip New York in population within twenty-five years. Wait till the census of 1930 and Chicago may be setting the pace for London itself. — Mexican Herald.

Gettysburg Field of Battle Forever Consecrated

1907

At Gettysburg

Field of Battle Is Forever Consecrated to the Highest Ideals of American Valor.

See Naples and die!" wrote an enthusiast, and gave a new vogue to a moribund old world city by a sententious saying. But to the American whose soul is alive to patriotic emotion, a more fitting exhortation would be, see Gettysburg and live! And so seeing, live to be consecrated anew to American ideals. Realize and drink in from that historic fount the immortal lesson of "what they did here," that the nation might live — a grand object lesson, made manifest so that he that runs may read by its 600 monuments and tablets dedicated there to American valor.

A thrilling page it is that may be read in these silent yet speaking symbols which mark the various positions held by the 640 organizations that fiercely contended for victory during those fervid July days of '63. And punctuating the long lines of marble and granite memorials that thickly strew the picturesquely diversified field imposingly stand out the colossal bronze images of the leading generals in the commanding stations each occupied.

All the historic landmarks, too, are there to-day. Away to the west the Lutheran seminary, still standing like a sentinel on the outpost, round which the waves of battle raged and spumed and from the cupola of which Reynolds and Buford watched Hill's advance debouching from the woods on either side of the Chambersburg pike; and, just beyond, the undulating plain and McPherson's wood, the scene and altar of sacrifice whereon the valiant first corps of Meade's army unstintedly poured out its libation of blood. To the east and south, Cemetery hill and its prolonged ridge, along which stand out those never to be effaced features of the landscape — the national cemetery, with its 3,575 graves of union dead, the clump of trees or "high water mark of the rebellion," whence Pickett's braves were hurled back in disaster and death; the "bloody angle," and the peach orchard, which season after season renews itself in blossom and fruit; the wheat field, yearly sown to the same crop, but no longer yielding its "harvest of death"; grim Devil's Den, a rocky, wood-tangled maze to-day as it was and has ever been since the red Indian and savage beast sought it for their lair; the same wooded heights of Little and Big Roundtop, partly denuded, yet with many surviving ancient trees scarred and broken and torn by solid shot and shell, or trunks pimpled by many bullets, but fruitful yet with leafy life.

Vanished only are the mangled corpses of the slain, the rushing columns of struggling foeman. the blazing lines, the crash of musketry and cannon's deafening roar, the dying groans and frantic, swelling cheers. With all these marvelously preserved vestiges of the battle still defining its varying fortunes, and with the graphic story of the guides, very little exercise of the imagination is needed even to a stranger, none at all to the veteran who fought there to reconstruct the scene, and once seen render its realization vividly impressed forever on the mind.