Girl's Letter Is Joke on Bachelors, but It Overwhelms Her With Mail

1920

GREAT FALLS, Mont. — Miss Ethel Day, a pretty New York girl, has caused work for a few extra mail clerks and carriers in this city as the result of a little joke that she and two other girl friends played upon several thousand young bachelors scattered over the habitable globe a few months ago. Miss Day is now thoroly convinced of the potency of publicity, and so, incidentally, are the letter shooters and mail sorters in the Great Falls postoffice.

Last summer, while enjoying a vacation in the mountains with her two girl friends from New York, who helped her put over the joke, the trio decided to write the following epistle to a motion picture magazine:

"Editor: I am a girl 19 years old. With three other girls I herd cattle for a wealthy stockman. We get awfully lonely and would like to correspond with some Eastern men."

In one day's mail she received answering letters from Germany, France, Hawaii, the Philippines, Zanzibar, Africa; London, Texas. Maine, New Hampshire, Boston, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Cleveland, Norfolk. Va.; Brunswick, Ont., Can.; New York, Montreal, Key West. Fla.; Jersey City, the U. S. steamship Savannah, India, and numerous other points about the world.

A young lad from New York who evidently has the impression that Montana is still in "the wild and woolly West" asked Miss Day to put a good word for him with her boss so that he could come West and learn to punch cattle. Others spoke of wolves howling around the door.

A little Virginia lass has asked the following questions: "Do you dance? What style of dancing do they have in the West? (Imagine answering that one!) How are the folks out there, hospitable, friendly, sociable? How are the girls, the fellows? What are the chief entertainments? How do you spend your time?"

Now Miss Day for a little while thought it just lovely to receive hundreds of nice letters, but it is rapidly ceasing to be a joke. Each day her list of unanswered letters increases and all she needs is a permit to start a postoffice all her own. The problem could be easily solved by either ignoring the letters or sending them back unclaimed were it not for the fact that all her correspondents were so anxious for a reply that they carefully enclosed stamped, addressed envelopes.

However, Miss Day cheerfully says she will see the thing thru and answer every letter if she has to hire a couple of stenographers and a dictaphone and take a vacation for three months.

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

Building Old As U. P. Road

1915

Its Proprietor Still Lives, a Victim of Generosity and Poverty

LARAMIE, Wyo., Dec. 16. — In the ordinary city which began no further back than 1868 the oldest building would be of little consequence, but in a city in the West, whose existence dates from May 9 of that year, when the Union Pacific Railroad laid its first rails into and thru the townsite, the oldest house seems very old indeed to the residents and to the people generally.

Laramie's oldest building today is a long two-story building which was built by Patrick Doran, who is living here at present, as a hotel, and in which hundreds of transient and regular boarders were accommodated for years.

Doran had his own way of keeping books. He chalked the accounts on the inner side of the front door. If a customer disputed the bill, mine host would go to the door, carefully erase the score and tel1 the dissatisfied customer that they would start all over again.

The old building is of logs, cut in the mountains several miles southwest of the city and floated down the Laramie River. The building is now used for a blacksmith shop.

In the early days of the frontier hotel Mr. Doran would charge a dollar a meal from those who could pay a dollar and lesser sums from those who could not afford to pay. No man ever went away hungry that had any money at all, and Mr. Doran would never take the man's last cent, so that one can imagine the large number of accounts the inward side of that door used to carry. Doran himself was quite wealthy at one time, but accepts charity from the county.

Arizona's Stage Robbers — Dan Elkins and Wilbur

1896

Histories of Two Men Who Terrorized the Southwest

One Man "Holds Up" a Stage Load of Eight Passengers — Tracked to Their Hiding Place by Apaches

DAN ELKINS is remembered as the original lone bandit of the Southwest, because, single-handed, he once held up a stage load of eight passengers, besides the driver, all of whom were armed. For weeks the exploit was the talk of the men in and about Tombstone. Judge Bennett, now of San Gabriel, Cal., was one of the passengers, and he tells how the robber worked his desperate game.

"We on the inside of the coach had just been talking," says the Judge, of the robberies that Elkins and his partner, Wilbur, had committed in the Territory, and the shame it was that an organized effort was not made to go and keep after the villains until they were killed, even if it took a year, when we heard a rifle crack, and a man shout to the driver:

" 'Come, now, stop those horses or you'll drop dead.'

"We were traveling through a rocky region along the foothills, and each of us knew instantly that all were in for a hold-up then and there. Every one wondered what his neighbor would do with his pistol.

" 'I'll be hanged,' said a big man from Texas, 'if I'll stand this nonsense,' and he snatched his big shooting iron up from the seat at his side.

"The driver put on the brakes and the stage was stopped at once, when we heard a voice outside saying:

" 'Now you fellers on the inside get out on this side. The first man who gets out on the other side will drop dead as a smelt. Don't be lazy. All of you throw down your shooters as you file out of the coach, for there's a lot of sure rifle shots that's got their eyes on you and are hiding in these here rocks to lay you out cold dead if you don't mind what I'm telling you.'

"When I got out of the stage I noticed that the highwayman wore a wire mask contrivance over his face, and had a big black beard and a whole arsenal of weapons in a belt about his waist. He stood on a commanding boulder, and kept his Winchester repeater moving slowly over us. I took particular pains that he saw I threw down my two pistols on the ground, and I noticed that every one of us, including the Texan, did the same thing.

" 'Throw up your hands, gents, said the masked robber, when we were all on the ground and our pistols lay there in a pile by the side of the coach wheels. 'Now get in line there, quick and face this way. Keep your hands above your heads, don't move; keep your months shut or you'll know how quick a man can go plumb to death."

"We got in line facing our commander in a moment, and none of us could extend his hands quite high enough.

" 'Now, you young fellow with the monkey whiskers,' said the highwayman, 'you just shell out there where you stand. Turn your pockets inside out, so me and my pards can see that you're dealing fair. That's right. Now, while me and my pards keep you in gun range, you search that next man, turn his pockets out. Keep your hands up high, gents, and save trouble. Don't speak.'

"In a few minutes that seemed like ages of an awful silence, each man was searched," and we all stood there in a row with our pockets turned out and flapping in the morning breeze, our hands a full foot above our heads, and a small pile of wallets, watches, little pocket leather and cloth bags of coin lay at the feet of the young man of our party, who had been compelled to search his companions.

" 'Now, you driver, throw that money box off quick, while my pards keep you in range,' said the robber when we had been searched. 'There; that's right. Be lively. It may cost you your carcass. Get that ax under the back seat and chop the box open. Hurry up. Don't speak, and don't get behind that coach, or you'll drop.'

"The ax was got, and the driver chopped open the box near us while we stood there like metal forms in front of clothing stores. When the box had been split apart and the valuables thrown out, the highwayman, all the time keeping his rifle slowly moving up and down our line of silent, hand-uplifted men, said:

" 'Now, driver, get up on your seat. You gents get into your coach. Don't let me hear you peep. Driver, lick your horses up fast and get out of this.

" 'Now, gents,' said he, as the last of us had got back into our seats, weaponless, 'you can brag that you've been held up by a single-handed in the profesh. I don't mind telling you that I'm all alone to-day and that I need your money awful bad. Tell them Tombstone fellers that Dan Elkins has a new trick in his line of business.'

"The horses were whipped up, and the last we saw of Dan Elkins he stood there on that big boulder keeping his head still on us until we turned in the foothill road a mile away. I think the rascal must have got $1000 that day. You see we did not carry much money on our persons in those days when there was danger of highway robbery."

During the winter of 1879 and 1880, the recklessness and bravado of Elkins and his partner, Wilbur, became unbearable, and people began to see that the stage robberies were hurting the name of Arizona, so an unusual effort was made to get the rascals. An extra reward for their capture was offered, and two or three detectives from Los Angeles, Cal., began work. Several half-breed Apache Indian trailers were hired, and after a few weeks the trail to the bandits was found. These Apache trailers are the most wonderful of their kind. They sometimes follow a man's tracks across a desert of sand, even after a windstorm, when the tracks have become obliterated to white men's eyes. They can follow at break-neck speed on a horse the trail of a man who has run in moccasins and taken pains to leave only the faintest traces of his course. They see signs of a trail through cactus and sage brush that no white man would recognize.

After a short period of more trailing and questioning of the few white settlers in the region Elkins and Wilbur were located. Their hiding place was thirty miles south from Benson, among the granite foothills, where no white man but they had probably ever been. Indians were hired to go to the spot, and to act as if they were out hunting and had unwittingly stumbled upon the bandits. Then when the Indians had engaged Elkins and Wilbur in conversation they were to give a signal. A posse of twenty men was to ride at once to the scene. Each man in the band was to take his chances of getting shot by the robbers.

The plan worked well. The bandits were asleep when the Indians came to them one warm afternoon. The Apaches asked for food, and while Wilbur went to get a knife to cut a slice from a deer hanging in the mesquite brush near at hand one of the Indians, pretending to be interested in one of the white stranger's pistols, discharged it. A few minutes later the posse rode up pell mell from behind a low foothill that impeded the view half a mile away.

"We're trapped! we're trapped!" shrieked Elkins as he jumped from his couch of leaves and saw the horsemen encircling about his hiding place.

In a second he and Wilbur were behind two great oaks, and were prepared to fight for their lives. They forgot the Indians at their rear, and no sooner had they turned their faces toward the advancing posse than they were shot dead in the back by the Apache trailers.

There is good reason to believe that if the men had been captured alive they might have been induced to tell where they had hidden the greater part of their stolen money and gold, for no one thinks that, living as they did, they spent more than a small part of their ill-gotten gains. Both the robbers were buried where they were killed, and to this day there are people who go out from the now well-populated town of Benson every little while to the scene of the old camp of Elkins and Wilbur in the hope of finding the secret storehouse of stolen riches among the boulders and foothills that surround the spot. — New York Sun.

Broncho Busting Near Its End

1921

Said There Will Be No More Wild Horses in Rocky Mountain States

CIVILIZATION SPELLS FINISH

Ranches Are Being Fenced and No More Do Wild Horses Range the Plains of Wyoming and Adjacent States

Denver, Colo. — Broncho busters of the northern Rocky Mountain states are about to go out of business, according to reports from officials of wild West and frontier shows. The reason is there aren't any wild horses to bust. At least not around Wyoming and this part of the country.

But down in Arizona they have wild horses to eat. There are 10,000 of them. They belong to the San Carlos Indians, who have a reservation not far from Globe. But there isn't much chance of getting the Arizona ponies for the broncho busters of Wyoming, for the Indians won't give them up.

Growing Shorter

The day of the wild herd of horses roaming the plains of Wyoming and adjacent states has been growing rapidly shorter with the encouragement of civilization. More and more ranches are being fenced in, herds of cattle are reduced or confined, and to make the matter worse for the existence of the wild steeds, oil drilling camps have been extended over wide areas of Wyoming, northwestern Colorado and Utah.

But down on the San Carlos Indian reservation there are 10,000 wild steeds, roaming at will over the fields, destroying mile after mile of grazing land which might be put into good use for cattle, and turning green grass of the prairie into a scrawny covering for their bones which hardly makes even a decent meal for an Indian.

The cattlemen have tried to buy them, but the Indians wouldn't listen. The government, through A. H. Symonds, Indian agent, ordered to purchase them at about $6 a head, invest the money in cattle and save the meat from the horses, giving it back to the Indians for winter food.

Horses Are Worthless

But the Indians would have none of it. The horses are worthless, even for hides. They cannot be domesticated and the meat isn't much of a delicacy, but the Indians insist on their age-old prerogative to have their herds out on the open prairie even as their fathers did. The Indians also have about 2,000 wild burros which they say they will keep.

"And when an Indian makes up his mind," Symonds says, "you've got to have patience to get him to change it. They are proud of the horses and burros for some reason, and although some of their leaders have tried to persuade them to accept the offers made, so far they have refused to sell."

Custer's Father and The Horse Presented to Him

1878

Mrs. Custer has a room at Lansing full of relics of her late husband. His pet, a Scotch hound — a great creature into whose eyes he used to look and say to his wife that no one could doubt that animals had souls — is in possession of a Cleveland lady, but the other animal, who traveled with him always by flood and field, sometimes across the saddle and sometimes put into a box and forwarded from station to station, is in his father's possession, as is also the horse which he rode up to the time of his death and which carried him to the very scene of slaughter.

The horse was purchased by some of Custer's brother officers and presented to Mrs. Custer, who gave it to her husband's aged father. The elder Custer is a feeble old man with snow-white hair, but not a day passes but that he mounts his "Artie's" steed — (Custer's middle name was Armstrong, abbreviated into "Artie") and takes a gallop along the road.

He talks of his dead son continually: "All my boys were good boys to me, but you know 'Artie' was my baby," he will say piteously. A great friend of Mrs. Custer, who brought her late husband's aged father from his Western home to West Point, to attend the burial, saw a pathetic little sight that will show how much the poor old man — old enough to have been Custer's grandfather — thinks of his dead hero.

One day she sought Mr. Custer in the barn, she found him in the stall devoted to his son's steed. He had come in from a ride, and having fed the animal, had gone to sleep with his arm thrown over the horse's neck, and his white, hair streaming over its glossy coat. There were tears, too, on his withered cheeks.