Advertising Card For Captain Jack Crawford – “The Poet Scout.” – SOLD

Description

Advertising Card For Captain Jack Crawford with a photogravure of “The Poet Scout.”    The Original Boy Scout and Daddy of the Boy Heroes of the World.” Two sided. Offering his latest book, and a quote from Thomas E. Watson from Watson’s Magazine giving a brief biography on the “Poet Scout’s Book.”

Captain Jack Crawford offers his new enlarged edition which had been reduced to $1.00, and he offered a personal autograph copy, at his address (corrected) with hand stamp.

John Wallace (“Captain Jack”) Crawford (1847–1917), known as “The Poet Scout”, was a master storyteller about the Wild West.  What brought about his notoriety, was the daring ride of 350 miles in six days to carry dispatches to Fort Laramie, Dakota Territory for the New York Herald, to tell the news of the great victory by Gen. George Crook against the village of Chief American Horse, at the battle of Slim Buttes during the Great Sioux War of 1876-77, made him a national celebrity.

Crawford, enlisted in the 48th Pennsylvania Infantry in the later part of the war and was wounded at the Battles of Spottsylvania, and Petersburg.  After the war, he went home and worked in the mines at Centralia, Pa.  A few years after the war, his mother died, but before she left these earthly bounds, she got young Crawford to promise never to take a drop of alcohol (his father was a heavy drinker), and throughout his whole life, maintained that promise.

In 1875, Jack Crawford, an avid reader, and longing to be a writer went west to the mining area in the Black Hills in Dakota Terr. (S.D), and took a job as correspondent for the Omaha Daily Bee. The citizens of Custer City, during the mid 1870s and all the Indian troubles, established a militia, and voted Crawford Chief of Scouts of the 125 man unit.  It was most likely that the rank “captain” stuck when he became captain of the Black Hills Rangers.

After George Armstrong Custer’s death on the Little Bighorn, Crawford joined Brig. Gen. George Crook’s command as a civilian scout with the Fifth Cavalry on July 22, 1876. Jack is credited with carrying dispatches on a highly perilous route of 350 miles alone to Fort Fetterman, and he took part in the Horse Meat March of 1876, one of the most grueling marches in American military history. Crawford played a significant role in the Battle of Slim Buttes (1876) and made a daring ride of more than three hundred miles in six days to carry dispatches of the victory to Fort Laramie for the New York Herald. One of his most famous exploits included delivering a bottle of whiskey to Buffalo Bill Cody, while on campaign. Cody wrote of the incident in An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill.

Crawford remained in the west, working as a scout for the army, and was part of several campaigns. He went from the Northern Plains to Arizona and served in campaigns in the Southwest against the Apache.

In the early ’90s, Jack worked for Wild Bill Cody, in the latter’s Wild West Show, and Crawford built a national reputation as an entertainer known as the “Poet Scout.” Captain Jack was a popular speaker and performer in music halls and stages all over the U.S. lecturing on the West, the Sioux Wars and encouraging his audiences to forswear liquor. Crawford was a prolific writer and published seven books of poetry, wrote more than one hundred short stories and copyrighted four plays. Crawford died in 1917.

The name “Poet Scout” at times does Crawford little justice for those unfamiliar with his western exploits as a real army scout, on many dangerous campaigns against waring tribes of the American west.  He deserves a far better write-up than I have posted here with help from Wikipedia.

The image below is not included with the card.  Scouts with their Chief Captain Anson Mills, posed before the lodge of Chief American Horse. Note the guidon leaning against the tip-pie, a 7th Cavalry Guidon, picked up at the Little Big Horn.

 

Post Card sized, in fine condition.