John Wallace Crawford was an American adventurer and poet.
Background
John Wallace Crawford was born on March 4, 1847 in County Donegal, Ireland. He was the son of John Austin and Susie (Wallace) Crawford. The mother claimed descent from the famous chieftain, William Wallace. The father, a Glasgow tailor, when threatened with arrest for some seditious utterance, fled to Ireland, where he met and married Miss Wallace. In 1854 he came to America, finding work as a coal miner at Minersville, Pennsylvania and four years later the mother and children followed.
Education
The boy had no opportunities for schooling.
Career
On the opening of the Civil War the father enlisted in the army, and the boy, after two rejections on account of his youth, was accepted for service in the 48th Pennsylvania Volunteers. At Spottsylvania, May 12, 1864, he was badly wounded. In the Saterlee Hospital, in West Philadelphia, through the efforts of a Sister of Charity, he learned to read and write. He was again sent to the front, and at Petersburg, April 2, 1865, was again wounded. Shortly afterward his mother and father died, his mother exacting a deathbed promise from him that he would never touch liquor.
For several years he was variously employed. He is said to have been one of the first seven men to enter the Black Hills region after the Custer expedition of 1874. A local document dated April 25, 1876, mentions him as a member of the Board of Trustees of Custer City and chief of scouts for a volunteer organization known as the Black Hills Rangers. In the Sioux War of that year he served as a scout and messenger for both Merritt and Crook, and on August 24 succeeded Cody (Buffalo Bill) as Merritt's chief of scouts. He later served as a scout in the campaigns against the Apaches. He was for a time post trader at Fort Craig, New Mexico and later a special agent of the Indian Bureau. Near San Marcial, on the Rio Grande, in 1886, he established a ranch, which for the remainder of his life was his main home, though he also had a home in Brooklyn. He had by the late seventies become famous as a composer and reciter of verses. His first volume, The Poet Scout, was published in 1879 and was succeeded by a revised and enlarged edition of the same work (1886); Camp Fire Sparks (1893); Lariattes (1904), and The Broncho Book (1908).
He also wrote three plays, in the production of which he took the leading part, and more than one hundred short stories. As a lecturer and a reciter of his own verses he was a noted figure for many years.
He died in his Brooklyn home.
His work as a scout was highly praised by his commanders. His verses, though popular in his day, can by no stretch of courtesy be called poetry.
Achievements
Views
Quotations:
"I am simply Jack Crawford, boy soldier, rustic poet, scout, bad actor, etc. "
Personality
Crawford was a tall man of wiry build, with nervous, sensitive face. He wore his hair and beard after the fashion of his friend Buffalo Bill, and he dressed the part of a "poet scout. " His histrionic embellishments seem, however, to have been chiefly a concession to the public demand, for he was at bottom simple and unaffected.
Connections
He married Anna M. Stokes of Numidia, Pennsylvania in 1869.