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bat on both sides as is ever witnessed. The Fifth had a genuine affection for Bill; he was a tried and true comrade- one who for cool daring and judgement had no superior. He was a beautiful horseman, an unrivaled shot, and as a scout unequaled. We tried tham all-Hualpais and Tontos in Arizona; half-breeds on the great plains. We had followed Custer's old guide, "CALIFORNIA JOE," in Dakota, met handsome BILL HICKOX ("Wild Bill") in the Black Hills; trailed for weeks after Crook's favorite, FRANK GRUARD, with "LITTLE BAT" and "BIG BAPTISTE," three good ones, all over the Big Horn and Powder River country; hunted Nez Perces with COSGROVE and his Shoshones among the Yellowstone mountains, and listened to CRAWFORD'S yarns and rhymes in many a bivouac in the Northwest. They were all noted men in their way, but BILL CODY was the paragon.
This time it is not my purpose to write of him, but for him, of another whom I have not yet named.
James White was his name; a man little known east of the Missouri, but on the plains he was "BUFFALO BILL'S" shadow. I had met him for the first time at the McPherson station in the Platte Valley, 1871, when he came to me with a horse, and the simple introduction that he was a friend of CODY's. Long afterward we found how true and staunch a friend, for when CODY joined us at Cheyenne as chief scout, he brought White with him as assistant, and Bill's recommendation secured his immediate employment.
On many a long day's march after that White rode by my side along the flanks of the column, and I got to know him well. A simpler-minded, a gentler frontiersoman never lived, He was modesty and courtesy itself, conspicuous mainly because of two or three unusual traits for his class-he never drank, I never heard him swear, and no man ever heard him lie.
For years he had been CODY's faithful follower, half servant, half "pardner." He was Bill's "Fidus Achates;" Bill was his adoration. They had been boys together, and the hero worship of extreme youth was simply intensified in the man. He copied Bill's dress, his gait, his carriage, his speech- everything he could copy; he let his long yellow hair fall low upon his shoulders in wistful imitation of Bill's glossy brown curls. He took more care of Bill's guns and horses than he did of his own and so, when he finally claimed, one night at Laramie, the right to be known by some other title than simple John White-something descriptive, as it were, of his attachment for CODY, and lifelong devotion to his idol, "BUFFALO BILL," a grim quartermaster (Morton of the Ninth Infantry) dubbed him "BUFFALO CHIPS," and the name was a fixture. His storywas a brief one after that episode. We launched out from Laramie on the 22nd of June, and through all the vicissitudes of the campaign that followed, he was always near the Fifth, On the Yellowstone CODY was compelled to bid us a reluctant farewell General Terry.
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