Читать книгу On The Border With Crook - John Gregory Bourke - Страница 3

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THERE is an old saying in the army which teaches that you can never know a man until after having made a scout with him in bad weather. All the good qualities and bad in the human makeup force their way to the surface under the stimulus of privation and danger, and it not infrequently happens that the comrade who at the military post was most popular, by reason of charm of manner and geniality, returns from this trial sadly lowered in the estimation of his fellows, and that he who in the garrison was most retiring, self-composed, and least anxious to make a display of glittering uniform, has swept all before him by the evidence he has given of fortitude, equanimity, courage, coolness, and good judgment under circumstances of danger and distress. But, whether the maxim be true or false, it is hardly too much for me to claim a hearing while I recall all that I know of a man with whom for more than fifteen years, it was my fortune to be intimately associated in all the changing vicissitudes which constituted service on the “border” of yesterday, which has vanished never to return.

It is not my purpose to write a biography of my late friend and commander—such a task I leave for others to whom it may be more congenial; speaking for myself, I am compelled to say that it is always difficult for me to peruse biography of any kind, especially military, and that which I do not care to read I do not care to ask others to read. In the present volume, there will be found collected descriptions of the regions in which the major portion of General Crook’s Indian work was carried on; the people, both red and white, with whom he was brought into contact; the difficulties with which he had to contend, and the manner in which he overcame them; and a short sketch of the principles guiding him in his justly famous intercourse with the various tribes—from British America to Mexico, from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean—subjugated by him and afterwards placed under his charge.

A military service of nearly forty consecutive years—all of which, excepting the portion spent in the civil war, had been face to face with the most difficult problems of the Indian question, and with the fiercest and most astute of all the tribes of savages encountered by the Caucasian in his conquering advance across the continent—made General Crook in every way worthy of the eulogy pronounced upon him by the grizzled old veteran, General William T. Sherman, upon hearing of his death, that he was the greatest Indian-fighter and manager the army of the United States ever had.

In all the campaigns which made the name of George Crook a beacon of hope to the settler and a terror to the tribes in hostility, as well as in all the efforts which he so successfully made for the elevation of the red man in the path of civilization and which showed that Crook was not a brutal soldier with no instincts save those for slaughter, but possessed of wonderful tenderness and commiseration for the vanquished as well as a most intelligent appreciation of the needs and capabilities of the aborigines, I was by his side, a member of his military staff, and thus obtained an insight into the charms and powers of a character which equalled that of any of the noble sons of whom our country is so justly proud.