It was when the Captain was sheriff of the Black Hills that father first met him. A horse-thief that was “wanted” in the Deadwood district managed to slip out of the Captain’s clutches and was captured by father, who was deputy sheriff in a country three or four hundred miles north. A little while later father had to go to Deadwood on business. Fording a river some miles out of town he ran into the Captain. Father had often heard of Seth Bullock, for his record and character were known far and wide, and he had no difficulty in identifying the tall, slim, hawk-featured Westerner sitting his horse like a centaur. Seth Bullock, however, did not know so much about father, and was very suspicious of the rough, unkempt group just in from two weeks’ sleeping out in the gumbo and sage-brush. He made up his mind that it was a tin-horn gambling outfit and would bear close watching. He was not sure but what it would be best to turn them right back, and let them walk around his district “like it was a swamp.” After settling father’s identity the Captain’s suspicions vanished. That was the beginning of their lifelong friendship.
After father had returned to the East to live, Seth Bullock would come on to see him every so often, and whenever my father’s campaigning took him West the Captain would join the train and stay with him until the trip was finished. These tours were rarely without incident, and in his autobiography father has told of the part Seth Bullock played on one of them.
When, in 1900, I was nominated for Vice-President, I was sent by the National Committee on a trip into the States of the high plains and the Rocky Mountains. These had all gone overwhelmingly for Mr. Bryan on the free-silver issue four years previously, and it was thought that I, because of my knowledge of and acquaintanceship with the people, might accomplish something toward bringing them back into line. It was an interesting trip, and the monotony usually attendant upon such a campaign of political speaking was diversified in vivid fashion by occasional hostile audiences. One or two of the meetings ended in riots. One meeting was finally broken up by a mob; everybody fought so that the speaking had to stop. Soon after this we reached another town where we were told there might be trouble. Here the local committee included an old and valued friend, a “two-gun” man of repute, who was not in the least quarrelsome, but who always kept his word. We marched round to the local opera-house, which was packed with a mass of men, many of them rather rough-looking. My friend the two-gun man sat immediately behind me, a gun on each hip, his arms folded, looking at the audience; fixing his gaze with instant intentness on any section of the house from which there came so much as a whisper. The audience listened to me with rapt attention. At the end, with a pride in my rhetorical powers which proceeded from a misunderstanding of the situation, I remarked to the chairman: “I held that audience well; there wasn’t an interruption.” To which the chairman replied: “Interruption? Well, I guess not! Seth had sent round word that if any son of a gun peeped he’d kill him.” (Autobiography, p. 141.)
Father had the greatest admiration and affection for the Captain. It was to him that he was referring in his autobiography when he wrote:
I have sometimes been asked if Wister’s Virginian is not overdrawn; why, one of the men I have mentioned in this chapter was in all essentials the “Virginian” in real life, not only in his force but in his charm.
When we were hunting in Africa father decided that he would try to get Seth Bullock to meet us in Europe at the end of the trip. I remember father describing him to some of our English friends in Khartoum, and saying: “Seth Bullock is a true Westerner, the finest type of frontiersman. He could handle himself in any situation, and if I felt that I did not wish him to meet any particular person, the reflection would be entirely on the latter.”
The Captain wrote me that he was afraid he could not meet us in London because of the illness of one of his daughters, but matters eventually worked out in such a way that he was able to go over to England, and when he met father there he said he felt like hanging his Stetson on the dome of Saint Paul’s and shooting it off, to show his exhilaration at the reunion. He thoroughly enjoyed himself in England, and while at bottom he was genuinely appreciative of the Britisher, he could not help poking sly fun at him. I remember riding on a bus with him and hearing him ask the conductor where this famous Picalilly Street was. The conductor said: “You must mean Piccadilly, sir.” The Captain entered into a lengthy conversation with him, and with an unmoved stolidity of facial expression that no Red Indian could have bettered, referred each time to “Picalilly,” and each time the little bus conductor would interpose a “You mean Piccadilly, sir,” with the dogged persistency of his race.
The major-domos and lackeys at the Guildhall and other receptions and the “beefeaters” at the Tower were a never-failing source of delight; he would try to picture them on a bad pony in the cow country, and explain that their costume would “make them the envy of every Sioux brave at an Indian dog-dance.”
When my sister and I were in Edinburgh, the local guide who took us through the Castle showed us an ancient gun, which instead of being merely double-barrelled, possessed a cluster of five or six barrels. With great amusement he told us how an American to whom he had been showing the piece a few days previously had remarked that to be shot at with that gun must be like taking a shower-bath. A few questions served to justify the conclusion we had immediately formed as to identity of our predecessor.