SAW him first in the summer of 1902. He was then (if I am to believe the War Department records) rising ninety-five years old.
The veterans of the Old Soldiers' Home at Yountville, California, had just finished the stiff and pathetic ceremonial of daily guard mount. And among them, as they tottered away to their quarters, my eye caught the one who was different. At a distance his gait and carriage marked him. Little, stiff, and old though he was, he walked with a curious freedom of the hips. His body sloped forward with each step at an angle wholly unmilitary, and he planted his feet parallel with the line of his course. As he came nearer, the blurred outlines under his slouch hat grew to an extraordinary face.
The wonder of it was not so much a certain aquiline nobility in the mold—spite of his creases and wrinkles—as the contrast between his leathery skin and a pair of youthful eyes. Large, full, gray-blue, they showed no blurs across the iris, no tinge in the eyeballs. Gray agates in globes of porcelain, they had always the appearance of looking far away. Even as he approached, saluted the commandant, and pursed his lips into a familiar smile, they seemed to be observing something in the distances beyond.
"A plainsman or a trapper if ever I saw one," I said.
"Right the first time," answered the commandant, "and the oldest living, I guess. That's Buckskin Joe O'Donnell, Kit Carson's chief scout in California. Oh, Joe!" he called.
HE old man turned on the word, and came nearer. His voice broke and crackled as he spoke.
"Mornin', Colonel. Whar's Old Bess?"
"His gun," whispered the Colonel. "He lost his gun before they brought him here." It was as though a ghost had risen before us—a ghost of the old West. For it is a dead dialect that he spoke; they say "thar" and "whar" and "ba'ar" no longer in all the length and breadth of the Western country. Here was a man speaking that dialect and, without affectation, giving a pet name to his gun!
Buckskin Joe had caught the whisper.
"I want Old Bess!" he said with a kind of defiance. "They took away Old Bess! No more hunting for Joe O'Donnell and three squa'ars a day: I want Bess!"
The commandant hailed a passing veteran and borrowed a Springfield rifle.
"Let's see how you shoot, Joe," he said. A change came over the old man; his face set itself in stern lines, his back stiffened. He brought the implement of his craft to shoulder, and held it, steady as a rock, on a distant horse. His trigger hand was high, his trigger finger had the long, sensitive reach of the expert shot, and neither you nor I could keep a muzzle so steady.
Suddenly he grounded the butt. "It ain't like Bess," he grumbled. "No new-fangled gun's as good as Old Bess." And he was gone toward his quarters.
"They found him on a ferry of the San Joaquin," said the commandant. "He was feeble and a little touched, and people were afraid he'd drown. The sheriff found his Mexican War papers and shipped him up to us. His hair was on his shoulders—I bet it hadn't been cut for forty years—and such a time as we had shearing him! We thought he hadn't long to live, but after we fed him up he brightened a lot. His mind wanders some, though I've noticed that when he talks to Charlie he talks pretty straight."
"Who's Charlie?" I asked.
The commandant smiled.
"We've some pretty queer stories up here. This is the queerest, I suppose. Buckskin Joe gets his one drink of whisky a day—doctor's orders—three o'clock at the canteen. He's himself for a while after that, and talks straight. You'd better ask Joe about Charlie and—everything."
I found Buckskin Joe in the canteen at three; we sat and talked while he sipped his glass of whisky, while his mental faculties gathered themselves. The story came out at first in fragments, in exclamations broken by Spanish words, by phrases from forgotten Indian tongues. But when I guided him in the right direction, he talked vividly, consecutively. He spoke, too, in the fashion of the very old—impersonally, as about some one else. Life was over; he was only waiting; why should he not tell, with no shame at revealing his penetralia, not only the outward events of the past existence, but also its triumphs, its shames, its failures, and its hidden glories? Parts of this story I confirmed afterward by history. I even visited a certain grave among the vinelands of old Sonoma, and found from its flaking inscription how truly Buckskin Joe spoke.