CHAPTER XII 



SOME WESTERN CHARACTERS 



BORN in the historic old town of Leavenworth, 

 Kans., in i860, I have vague memories of what 

 I now know as the Civil War, which, to a child's 

 mind, meant only hanging over the gate to watch 

 soldiers march by or fill canteens at our well, to 

 hear the bugle call, or the hushed voice of my mother 

 and her friends as they speculated on the fortunes of 

 war and the threatened "Price's raid," or, as Bret 

 Harte puts it in Miss Blanche Says — 



"Still it was stupid : Rat-a-tat-tat ! Those were the sounds 



of a battle summer, 

 Till the earth seemed a parchment round and flat, 

 And every footfall the tap of a drummer." 



Kansas was abolition; Missouri, just across the 

 Missouri River, was Confederate and largely guer- 

 rilla. Col. Jennison's celebrated abolition cavalry 

 regiment was stationed at Fort Leavenworth. His 

 men were "wildcats," every one a picked horseman 

 and consummate daredevil. It was said of that regi- 

 ment that its men were on the guerrilla order and 

 especially careless about the title of a horse ; in fact, 

 the usual pedigree of a horse was "by Jennison out of 



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