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THE SCOUT-MEN WHO WORE THE BUCKSKINS.

The pioneer of American civilization was the Scout. He was the leader of its advanced guard. Upon him rested the responsibility of the lives of his comrades, and the success of their mission. Verily he was a leader among men. As in every event in the history of the world, when the situation demanded a certain type of man for its great emergencies, the men were always found to fill it. So it was with the "Buckskin" Scout, so called from his dress of that material.

In the early days of the country every state and section had its scout, who was and is to-day a noted historical celebrity. Simon Kenton, Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, Daniel Boone, General Beale, of the United States Army, who, with Kit Carson, traversed the continent, and brought the news of the capture of California to the authorities at Washington, Major Frank North, J. B. Hickok (Wild Bill), Alexis Goday, Jack Stillwell, Frank Guard, Yellowstone Kelly, etc., are all well-known names.

Many of the great and justly celebrated heroes of the Revolutionary War were trained to sustain well their great parts in that drama of freedom by their experiences as scouts on what was then itself the frontier. The warfare of the time was of the kind that produces scouts, and even down to the present time many of our array officers have been famed for the peculiar qualities and frontier lore necessary to the successful scout, notably Custer, Miles, Merritt, Crook, Carr, Captain Crawford (killed in Mexico), Captain Burke, Captain Bullis, Major "Jack" Hayes, Lieut. Casey (killed in Pine Bridge, 1891), Gen Lawton, and others.

In Indian warfare the scout was always the most important factor for many reasons: He was dealing with a foe who had invented a system of warfare which was essentially his own. The basis of it was strategy, and that of a kind which involved a keenness of vision, and even of scent. He tracked his foe or avoided him by trifles as small as a twisted leaf, or the crushing of a blade of grass. All of this wood lore of his the scout was compelled to learn, and then by applying his knowledge best him at his own game. The Indian was a scout by nature and inheritance, the white scout had to dominate and offset that by his superior intelligence.

Many of the celebrities of the Civil War, also, were trained as scouts in the hard school of practical Indian warfare; a school in which they learned to acquire first of all self-reliance. The scout works alone, and this developed in a most extraordinary degree the great virtue of independence of character. Personal courage was a sine qua non, danger was ever present, and he who was a great scout was a brave man among brave men. Skill is woodcraft, quickness of eyesight, endurance, fleetness of foot, superb horsemanship--in short none but the most intrepid braved the dangers and the sufferings incidental to the life of a scout. George Washington, beginning life as a young surveyor, the duties of his profession in those days carrying him, with his theodolite and chains, into the trackless wilderness, possessing all the qualities enumerated above, soon became not only a surveyor but a pioneer and a practical scout. Here were laid all the foundation for his future greatness, and it was always a great pride to the scouts that from their ranks arose the Father of His country and the pioneer of popular government. In the wilderness he developed all the simplicity and greatness which, with his unfaltering courage, carried him through the hardships, dangers and sufferings which founded a great nation. Communing with nature in the solitude of the forest, he breathed the air of freedom until it became the very warp and woof of his being, and this was the first step which he took toward the presidency of a great people. As a scout he learned warfare, and showed his skill and courage as the scout and saviour of the ill-fated Braddock Expedition.

His ancestors, Col. John Washington, laid the foundation of the soldier trait in the family by his prominence in Indian warfare in Virginia. When the corrupt Colonial Governor Berkley, for cowardly and mercenary reasons, met not the requirements of the occasion--a threatened Indian massacre--there arose the "young and gifted orator" and captain, Nathaniel bacon, the most romantic figure of his time, whose success with his "men in buckskin" on the warpath caused the governor's jealousy to outlaw him, resulting in his driving Berkley to the eastern shore of the Chesapeake, and made himself famous as a premature patriot who sought to throw off the abuses of government one hundred years before the time. His sickness and death cut short what history records as "Bacon's Rebellion."

The grandfather of Abraham Lincoln was a compatriot of Boone, was killed by Indians avenged by his son Mordecai (President Lincoln's uncle), who became "an Indian-stalker"--and the illustrious Lincoln himself was a cabin-born product of the prairie.

The pages of New England's early history gleam with thrilling stories of its frontier heroes, from "the first real buckskin warrior of New England, Benjamin Church, who beat the savage at his own game by learning the art of skulking, the ambuscade, the surprise," until the doom of despair buried or drove westward the Mohawks and Pequots.

In the early days of Indian warfare, when the whites were but as a handful and the Indians were countless thousands, when the border line of civilization was but a comparatively short distance from the sea-coast, the scout acted chiefly on the defensive. His was the mission to watch the wily red man, to guard against the sudden attack and surprise, and to lead the forces in their efforts to repel them; but as the years have rolled by and the conditions have changed, he began to abandon the defensive and, as the advance guard of the superior force and race, to attack and hunt the red man in his turn.

In the time of General Harney it because necessary to pass across the plains and open up the heart of this vast continent. It was imperative to open the trail from the Atlantic to the Pacific and thus foster the traffic and commercial future of the country. Then arose a new form of scout and scouting, in which shines brilliantly the names of Generals Sherman, Sheridan, Custer, Miles, Merritt, Carr, Crook, McKenzie, and other brave men, among whom (Buffalo Bill), as good an all-round plainsman as ever lived.

The conditions, too, had changed. No longer the scout opposed a people armed with the bow and arrow and spear; these had become obsolete, as had the flint-lock musket of our Puritan Fathers, and these deadly foes now confronted each other each equally well armed with the deadly repeating rifle and the merciless revolver. These were terrible weapons in the hands of a desperate foe. By this time (1806 to 1885) the Indian had reached the zenith of his capacity for doing harm. Realizing fully the hopelessness of the struggle with the white man, who was as the sands of the sea in number, he faced the problem of dying, by with his fact to the foe, and leaving as many of his conquerers dead as his valor could annihilate.

It was during these years that the fame of his predecessors in history fell upon the shoulders of Colonel Cody. The prominence into which he sprang, almost at one bound, would have been absolutely unattainable without the great natural and inherent qualities necessary to enable him to rise to the occasion.