AT THE PAINTED WOODS. 154 
tition Pont gave variety and picturesqueness to a rapid 
career on the steep incline. Himself and wife coming 
£ 
view the remains 
to their last home but one, with $10,000 cash and more 
to their credit until successive blows came hard and fast 
were among the first occupants of that ‘‘city of the 
dead’’ whose shafts of white marble meet the reflection 
of the morning sun from the high bluff overlooking 
Rhude’s addition to Washburn. No coroner came to 
as privation and broken hearts were 
not on the list of his official cognizance. No citation 
to the heirs as there was nothing to divide, and the last 
‘‘will and testament’’ rested without probate or revision 
_ The original Painted Woods yard which fell into the 
possession of Mercer & Gray about the year 1872. With 
the new proprietorship came John Keeler, Diamond the 
Wolfer and Henry Atherton, the Virginian. The 
last named afterward killed a man for an antelope near 
upper Square Buttes, opposite Little Knife River and 
took to penance for the same at Elm Point, where he 
emerged some years later as an unsuccessful lecturer on 
phrenology and when last heard from was financially 
and physically stranded somewhere out in the Sand Hill 
- country of northwestern Nebraska. John Keeler com- 
mitted suicide by drowning at Scott’s woodyard five or 
six years later. Diamond the Wolfer, afterward a sub- 
agent at Crow Agency, got into trouble, was wounded 
and returned eastward to his paternal roof in hopes to 
die in peace. Instead, he was dragged from his moth- 
er’s side by Federal marshals and died in the penitentiary 
hospital, in Deer Lodge, Montana. Charles Gray, of 
the firm proper—after many mishaps—froze to death 
during a break-up flood in an upper river woodyard. 
