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HE PROMISED HIS MOTHER
Why Capt. Jack Crawford, Scout and Poet, Did Not Drink.
WHEN Captain Jack Crawford, the poet scout, was the special guest at
the Allied Trade Press banquet at the New McAlpin Hotel, he was
asked at 2:30 a. m. to drink a toast to the ladies. Despite the fact
that there were no ladies present and wine had been flowing freely,
he did a brave and manly act when he said to the fifty or more editors: “Gen
tlemen, undoubtedly you have noticed that my wine glasses have been turn
ed upside down, and, although it may not be considered altogether in good
taste, there is only one toast that I can give, and which I gave at the Gover
nors banquet in Boston some years ago. A beautiful, laughing, blue-eyed
■society girl passed a glass of wine across the table to me and asked me to
give a toast to the ladies. Flowers between us hid my upturned glasses,
hence she did not know that I had not been drinking wine. I stood up, took
the glass from her jeweled hand and said: ‘Miss, your father, the toastmas
ter, is my comrade. This is a difficult task you have given me, and I shall
'drink a toast to Woman —not in that, however, which may bring her hus
band reeling home to abuse where he should love and cherish, send her boy
to a drunkard’s grave, and perhaps her daughter to a life of shame. Not
in that, but rather in God’s life giving water, pure as her chastity, clear
.as her intuitions, bright as her smile, sparkling as the laughter of her eyes,
strong and sustaining as her love’ —which I did amid profound silence.
“The girl was about to speak when I said, ‘Just a moment, please. That
toast would be entirely out of place without an explanation. Let me describe
;a scene in the mountains. My horse and I were on the trail of hostile In- (
'dians, almost famished for water, when, after discovering a spring and
'drinking, I heard several yells and whoops in a group of trees just below
me, and, approaching carefully, I saw a dozen men dancing around a camp
• fire and one of them, throwing his sombrero in the air, exclaimed, ‘Say
fellers, I reckon we’ve struck it rich at last.’ Thinking they were prospec
tors and that they had found gold, I jumped on to my mare, and as the sun
had just gone down, started toward the crowd. And immediately some
■one shouted, ‘lnddans, get yer guns.’ Thinking the Indians were behind me,
I put spurs to my mare; threw my head down alongside of her neck, and
started on the dead run, and just then someone shouted, ‘Don’t shoot; that’s
■a white man.’ In a few seconds more I was up with the group, wheeled
my mare around, and, pulling my Winchester, shouted: ‘Where’s the In
dians?’ ‘Who said anything about Indians?’ said a big fellow with long hair
;and a broad sombrero. ‘Someone shouted Indians,’ said I. ‘Wai, I reckon
there ain’t no Injins ’round here ’cept you’re one.’ ‘Me?’ I said, and my mare
•still dancing from the sting of the spurs, ‘me?’ ‘Yes, you, a’ if Shorty hadn’t
yelled that you was a white man, we’d a perforated your anatomy. Who are
.yer?’ ‘My name is Jack Crawford. The boys call me “Capt. Jack” because
I am chief of Uncle Sam’s scouts on the trail of hostile Indians.’ Then, be
fore I had time to quiz him, he said ‘l’ll tell ye what was the racket, Jack.
Ye see, we’ve been cooped up here in the mountains for near two months
prospectin’; hard work an’ no fun. We heard that a trader down on the
little Missourre had some tarantula pison (whiskey) an’ we sent out an’ cor
.al’d a jemijohn full. Ye see we’re celebratin’ last Fourth o’ July. We lost
■track o’ the date. Won’t you join us?’
“‘I surely will,’ said I, ‘though it is the 12th of August. Even if it was the
middle of January I would help you celebrate the glorius Fourth.’ Then Bill
said, ‘Shorty, that demijohn ’ill get stiff in the joints ’thout more exercise.
Start ’er round the ring again.’ And the demijohn was passed around until
it came to Bill.
“ ‘That’s the stuff,’ said he, ‘that warms up the hunter’s soul, makes him
forgit thar’s danger on the trail. Real old Kentucky rye, a laugh in eveiry
gurgle of the jug an d every gurgle of the jug a command for pain an’ trouble
to get off the trail.’
“After Bill had taken his drink he said, ‘Here, Jack.’ I was still on my
hunkers broiling my venison. ‘Here, Jack, take a swallow of this hallejuh
juice. It’ll make you feel as if yer soul had angel wings an’ was on the trail
to paradise.’
“ ‘No, thank you, Bill, I don’t drink.’
“‘Oh, go ’long; ye do on special occasions. An’ this is a special—a Fourth
of July celebration. Why can’t you?’
“ ‘Because I never took a drink of intoxicants in all my life.’ And Bill
laughed. Everybody laughed as Shorty said, ‘W’hat do you think of that?
A frontiersman that never took a drink. Come on, Jack, don’t you spring
that kind of a joke on us again. Throw your mouth into a sort of yearning
•attitude an’ down ’er.’ And he shoved the demijohn toward me. As I was
rising with my meat in my left hand, partly broiled, the demijohn came into
my hand with such force as to overbalance me. I sat down on the ground
with both hands full. Everyone laughed, and Shorty said, ‘Well, if the out
side of the jug is going to act like that what ’ill the inside do when it gets
mixed up with his inwards?’
“My head was aching frightfully as I arose to my knees, placed the meat on
the lid of the coffee pot and, holding the demijohn up, I said, ‘Boys, do you
really want me to drink?’
“ ‘Sure,’ said half a dozen.
“ ‘All right, boys, if you insist. But, before I drink, will you listen to a
little story?’
“ ‘Sure we will,’ said Bill. And, as I stood up and placed the demijohn on
the stump of a decayed tree, B’ll threw some wood on the fire, pulled his pipe
and began to fill it, while Shorty rolled a cigarette. Finally, as Bill lit Ms
The Golden Age for May Bth, 1913
pipe from a coal from the fire, he looked up as I stood in the fading daylight
with a full moon looking down upon one of the most beautiful and picturesque
scenes I have ever looked upon. Bill looked up after he got his pipe going
and said, ‘All right, Jack, unhitch yer jaw an’ let her go. I’ll bet she’s a bird
of a story. Keep still, Scotty.’
“This is the story, and absolutely true:
“ ‘Boys, it seems but yesterday that I was a barefooted boy at my mother’s
knee; wild, reckless, impulsive, misunderstood and abused by everybody but
her. She understood me, and, although the wildest, I was her favorite. My
father’s intemperance deprved me of even the rudiments of a school edu
cation, and, when on her death bed she said to me, ‘My poor, wild boy, did
you know that your mother was going to heaven?’ Boys, that was the first
great sorrow of my life. Down on my knees by her bedside I wept as I had
never wept before. As I sobbed, ‘Mother, dear, no one cares for me but you;
no one in all the world but you understand me. Oh, I am afraid I will go
wrong.’ How beautiful she looked, her big, brown eyes aswim in tears, her
white curls and her wh’te face on the pillow, and, as she placed her hand
on my head, she said, ‘Don’t cry, Johnny, dear; your mother will meet you
in heaven if he will’ give her a promise to take with her.’ ‘I will promise
you anything you ask, mother, and I will try to keep my promise.’ ‘Then
promise me never to touch intoxicants and then it won’t be so hard to leave
these two little sisters in your care.’ Boys, I gave that promise to mother
and she went to heaven with a smile on her face, still holding my hand, and,
as God is my judge, amid all the temptations of a frontier, army or social
life, I have kept that promise even when men who were called bad men
have put a six shooter in my face, when they considered it an insult to re
fuse to drink with them. I have folded my arms and, looking into the muz
zle of a gun, said, ‘You can shoot and you can kill me, but you can’t make
me break a promise that I gave to my dying mother,’ and I’ve seen a man who
had killed his man put his six shooter back in his belt, take a glass of liquor
he had poured out and throw it on the floor, after I had mentioned that word
‘mother,’ then take my hand and say, ‘Pard, I beg your pardon. I had that
kind of a mother,’ and walk out of the saloon. That man is living today.
He never took another drink.
•‘As I concluded my story, I picked up the demijohn, and, holding it up, said,
‘Boys, I said I would drink if you insisted, shall I?’ Quick as a flash there
was a shot; the demijohn was shattered; part of the liquor went into the
fire, a blue blaze leaped up. I pulled my own six shooter, for I did not see
where the shot came from, when, from behind the fire and smoke, Wild Bill
stepped out, the smoking pistol in his hand and tears on his bronzed cheeks,
as he said, ‘Nobody can drink when you talk like that. Say, Jack, that’s the
kind of a mother I had back in the sunrise country. I was jest like you,
a wild, reckless boy. I started wrong when I smoked my first cigarette as
a newsie, then I got to readin’ dime novels, and one time I went to see a
Wild West dime novel play, with real Western men killing Indians. Later
I got to drinking, and one day when crazed with liquor I shot a man and
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