Spanish-American War, 1898 -- Regimental histories; United States. Army. Volunteer Cavalry, 1st
It is difficult for me to withstand the temptation to tell what has
befallen some of my men since the regiment disbanded; how McGinty,
after spending some weeks in Roosevelt Hospital in New York with an
attack of fever, determined to call upon his captain, Woodbury Kane,
when he got out, and procuring a horse rode until he found Kane's
house, when he hitched the horse to a lamp-post and strolled in; how
Cherokee Bill married a wife in Hoboken, and as that pleasant city
ultimately proved an uncongenial field for his activities, how I had
to send both himself and his wife out to the Territory; how Happy
Jack, haunted by visions of the social methods obtaining in the best
saloons of Arizona, applied for the position of "bouncer out" at the
Executive Chamber when I was elected Governor, and how I got him a job
at railroading instead, and finally had to ship him back to his own
Territory also; how a valued friend from a cow ranch in the remote
West accepted a pressing invitation to spend a few days at the home of
another ex-trooper, a New Yorker of fastidious instincts, and arrived
with an umbrella as his only baggage; how poor Holderman and Pollock
both died and were buried with military honors, all of Pollock's
tribesmen coming to the burial; how Tom Isbell joined Buffalo Bill's
Wild West Show, and how, on the other hand, George Rowland scornfully
refused to remain in the East at all, writing to a gallant young New
Yorker who had been his bunkie: "Well, old boy, I am glad I didn't go
home with you for them people to look at, because I ain't a Buffalo or
a rhinoceros or a giraffe, and I don't like to be stared at, and you
know we didn't do no hard fighting down there. I have been in closer
places than that right here in United States, that is better men to
fight than them dam Spaniards." In another letter Rowland tells of the
fate of Tom Darnell, the rider, he who rode the sorrel horse of the
Third Cavalry: "There ain't much news to write of except poor old Tom
Darnell got killed about a month ago. Tom and another fellow had a
fight and he shot Tom through the heart and Tom was dead when he hit
the floor. Tom was sure a good old boy, and I sure hated to hear of
him going, and he had plenty of grit too. No man ever called on him
for a fight that he didn't get it."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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