Republican news item. [volume] (Laport, Pa.) 1896-19??, 1899-08-03
WESTERN SCOUT NO MORE.
Their Picturesque Calling Ruined b
Civilization.


Their Picturesque Calling Ruined by
Civilization.
About the most pitifully cheerless
men in the west nova lays are those
who have given the greater part of
their lives to scouting for the army,
and occasionally for cattle company
or band of miners, who have endured
generation of savage hardships and
have braved all the dangers of the
plains, and now, grizzled and gray,
realize that their occupation is gone
forever. There are scores of the old
fellows in the Territories. Several
hundred of the younger scouts have
become vaqueros, sheep herders, ex-
press messengers and guards, cattle
men, railroad men, miners and pros
pectors. Electricity and railroads
principally have made scouting obso-
lete, and since the Apaches in the
southwest and the Sioux in the north
west have been beaten into peaceful
relations with the white settlers
there has been no demand for the
services of the old-time scout. The
war department kept some of the
scouts on the payroll, at the frontier
garrisons long after scouting had be-
army, but in 1890 the pay of many of
the old heroes was cut off, and by
1896 less than dozen white scouts
remained in the employ of the depart
ment in the southwest. In every town
of any size in this region one may see
some of the veteran scouts-poor in
purse, tattered of person-loafng
about the saloons, telling visitors from
the east of the glories of the frontier be-
fore civilization and railroads spoiled
it all, and half heartedly building
hopes of the day when something un-
expected may transpire and scouting
may be called into demand again.
There are dozen scouts of 25 and 30
years service spending their last days
in poverty and melancholy in Phenix,
Arizona. At Prescott, Arizona, a
score of old-time scouts live on the
bounty of cattlemen and gold miners.
AS years come and go and the scouts
see not the least sign of revival of
their departed occupation, they be-
come more touchingly glum.
Like the knight in the band of
Richard the Lion Heart, who thanked
God he was not clerk, the true scout
of the Western plains has few if any
counterparts. Along with the Rang
ers of Texas he is one of Americas
most characteristic and picturesque
types. No wonder he was seized upon
SO unanimously by authors and paint
ers as material for romance and pic
ture. The wildness and at the same
time the peculiar tenderness of the
scouts life, the adventurous charac-
ter of his daring, his GOODNESS and sa-
| gacity in the midst of danger, his use
of simplest facts in nature to gain his
ends, his roamings in regions hitherto
untrodden by white men, his thor
ough knowledge of the ways of red
men, and especially his craftiness, are
all features in the life of a genuine
scout of the plains that stimulate the
Imagination of story tellers and pic
ture makers. 1t is hard in these
days to realize how great a part the
scouts of the forties and fifties played
in the settlement and the civilization
of the plains and the Pacific coast.
Kit Carson was the earliest and he
still remains the most famous Ameri-
can scout. The way he guided the
Fremont exploring expedition through
the Rocky mountains in 1S41, and
thence, in 1S43, some 100 miles across
the trackless desert plains, abounding
with Indians, past Salt Lake in Utah,
through the snow and ice OF the passes
of the Sierras to California, is as thrill
ling chapter as may be found in
fiction. From that time till ten years
ago the war department constantly
employed scouts in the Western army
! service.