MORTIMER N. KRESS.
(Wild Bill.)
ALENE KRESS.
The author visited him at his home in Nebraska, in the spring of 1907. The noted hunter, Indian fighter, and scout, Sol. Rees, took me from Jennings, Kansas, to the home of Kress, near Hastings, Nebr., generously defraying the expenses. The three of us separated in Texas in the spring of 1878; and after twenty-nine years of neither hearing from nor seeing each other, we held a reunion of the "Forlorn Hope;" and it did my heart good to once more meet this big, generous, warm-hearted plainsman of the old days. As I looked in the face of the man who stood as a buffer between the settlers and wild Indians on the frontier of Nebraska and the western border of Texas, my thoughts went back to two particular incidents of the many thrilling ones I had passed through in company with him.
The first was at the hunters' fight with the Indians on the 18th of March, 1877, already described. All through that fierce fight, he kept a level head and used a dangerous gun. He tore away the mask and showed the real mettle and fiber of his composition. When there would be a lull in the fight, or a change of base was made, Kress kept those within his hearing livened up by his dry humor and seemingly total indifference to his surroundings.
Then again on the 27th, 28th and 29th of July, already alluded to, he divided up a six-pound powder-can of water as generously as though a river were flowing near by; and men of his type suffered and moved on. How thankful I felt while at his home, so beautifully located on the banks of the sparkling waters of the Little Blue, to see my comrade living in a manor-house, his cribs and granaries groaning with the 1906 harvest, and surrounded by a community that fairly pay him reverence. For they know enough of his past life and the sacrifices he made, to help make it possible for his neighbors to have the peaceful, happy homes that surround this once "Wild Bill." In the country where he resides he was the first settler on the Little Blue, having homesteaded in 1869. He has identified himself with that particular region for thirty-nine years; and has seen the passing of the overland stage line, the Indian, and the buffalo.
And he is far better equipped to write "The Border and the Buffalo," than myself. He is a native of Pennsylvania; soldiered four years during the Rebellion, in the First Pennsylvania Cavalry. I was closely identified with him from 1875 to 1878, in Texas, in a common cause, viz., "The destruction of the buffalo, and settling the wild Indian question," which had the approval of all frontier army officers, regardless of the fact that Ernest Thompson Seton said "the hunters were the dregs of the border towns."
While talking with Kress at his home in regard to his experience on the 29th and 30th of July, 1877, when we became demoralized for want of water, I learned that he and Jim Harvey, our citizen captain, were in very poor health when we left the Double Lakes on the 27th. Here is his own statement: