Lonesome Charley. A STORY AND THE END OF ONE GENERAL CUSTER'S SCOUTS.

Waikato Times, Volume X, Issue 664, 23 September 1876, Page 5 (Supplement)

Lonesome Charley. A STORY AND THE END OF ONE GENERAL CUSTER'S SCOUT S.

Now that the details of the terrible buttle on the Little Horn hare come, we realize what an act of awful bVavery that ride of Caster's was. Three hundred braver men never died in war ; there never was a sterner test of personal courage. I see ip the list of the killed the name of Charley Reynolds — ' Lonesome Charley' Reynolds. He was one of those remarkable characters sometimes met with in the rude life of the frontier. Under his rough exterior there was a *oul as refined and gentle as ever reigned in a woman's breast, and, as is unusual in snch cases, no amount of vulgar association or want of kindred sympathy could dull its lustre one degree. When Custer was at the base of Harney's Peak in 1874, and our camp was ablaze with excitement over the gold discoveries, Custer sent for Bloody Knife, the cUeif of his scouts, and asked for an Indian to carry dispatches over to Fort Laramie, 200 miles below v?. Bloody Knife shook his head solemnly and said in reply : ' My warriors are brave, but they are wise. " They will carry a bag of letters to Fort Lincoln, but I cannot ask them to go through the Sioux country to Laramie.' Fort Lincoln was 200 miles farther than Laramie, although, the route to the latter pUce was beset with tenfold more dangers. It led directly through, the Sioux hunting ground, and just at this particular time of year the young men , were all out in hunting parties, so that the plans were full of them. Bloody Knife's braves were Eecs — a tribe for which the Sioux has a hereditary enmity, and he was too wise to ask one of them to undertake so suicidal a project. But mails must be esnt somehow, and Custer was ponderiug what to do. Charly Reynolds was sitting by on the ground, with bis legs crossed, cleaning a revolver, seemingly inattentive to the conversation. Custer had been thinking but a moment, when Reynolds looked up and said : 1 I'll carry the mails to Laramie, General.' ■ I Ouster was familiar with courage in every form, but such, a proposition surprised even him. • I wouldn't ask you to go, Reynolds/ he said. ' I hare no Fear,' responded tbje scout quietly ; ' whon will the mails be ready ?' ' I was intending to send something to-morrow night,' replied Custer, ' I'll go to-morrow night.' And picking up his piece of buckskin and bottle of oil, Reynolds strode quietly airay. ' There goes a man,' said Custer, ' who is a constant succession of surprises to me. I am getting so that I feel a humiliation in his presence. Scarcely a day passes — and I have known him three years — that does not develop some new and strong trait iv his character. I would as soon have asked my brother Tom to carry a mail to Lararaie as Reynolds.' The next day I saw Reynolds lead an old, ill-shaped, bony, dun- colored horse to the farrier's. I was somewhat curious te know if he was going to ride that j animal to Laramie, and asked him. • ' Yes,' he said, in his quiet way. ' The General let me pick my own mount, and I've got one that suits me.' .Noticing my surprise at his choice, he continued : ' I suppose I could have picked out a better looking one, but this is the sort for my trip.' And scanning the beast over ho added : 'He knows more than a man, if he is boney. Look in his eye.' The farrier took the horse's shoes off and pared his hoofs neatly. Reynolds then went to the saddler and had a set of leather shoes made to fit the horse's feet, so as to buckle; around the fetlocks. 'What are those for!' I asked, 'A little dodge of mine to fool the Indians. They make no trail.' Then he packed three or four days' rations in a saddle-pocket, prepared a supply of amunition and cleaned up a long, old-fashioned rifle. Then, eating a hearty dinner, he lay down under a wagon for a nap. About four oMock that evening an engineering pai w started off in the direction Reynolds was to take, and saddling his horse and strapping on a. canvass bag iof letters, he accompanied us. We rode' I till about ten o'clock and went into camp lin a cluster of trees near a brook. A n*r*e I was lighted, a pot of coffee made, and ' after drinking a cupful Eeynolds mounted ! into his saddle Btnd rode silently off into the dark. His path lay tllirough a trackless wilderness — 200 milei of it — the constant haunt of hostile Indian*, and not a foot of the ground had Key aoldd ever teen before. He had never be. en at Laramie ; he only knew the general direction it which it lay, and his only gui de-board was the stars. After four nights of riding and three days of sleeping he r eiiched his destination, unharmed. I saY him afterward at Fort , Lincoln on our r eturn. He told me he got tb&ngh nicely and mailed the letters I intrusted to hi? , care. ' •it

Reynolds was the son of a '^df&y M(J aristocratic family in Tennesee, v * was educated in the North, and when the war broke out he found himself in a painfu.' dilemma. He had imbibed enough of Northern ideas to make him strongly hostile to the secession movement, while his family, consisting of a father, mother and sister, were violent sympathizers with the South. His father entered the Confederate army as an officer early in the war. The son could not go with him and fight against his principles, nOr could he stay at home and brook the taunts and pleadingi of his mother and sister, nor could he Join the Federal army and fight against his father, so he left his home and wandered away *° uo m ines on the Pacific slope. His hon?« was at the centre of hostilities, and all communication was cut off. At the close of the w£r he went to Tennessee, and what was*oi?ce hii home was desolation. The neighbor! told him his father had been killed in one of the battles his mother had died, and his* sister had married a rebel officer whose name was not remembered, and all trace of her had been lost. The old plantation had been confiscated, and there was not » single 'lie left to bind him to the pait. He spent some months in search of his sister, without result, 'and finally homelessness a.td a disposition which shrank from fellowship with man droye him back to his oldho^pi" the mountains in snend the rest of a wi^rv lift* From 18(55 to 1872 he was in the nr'nes in Colerado Montana, and hunting anu trapping along the streams of the great Northwest, being employed occasionally by the Government to do some work i for which ordinary men were too cowardly or were not competent.