DEDICATORY
To THE MEMORY OF MY WIFE, who departed this life on the twenty-first day of December, 1898, who for more than forty years traveled along life’s pathway by my side, through sim-shine and through storm unwaveringly; sharing in all the grief and hardships of life on the Western Border, as a Pioneer Woman in Kansas, Colorado, Dakota and Wyoming—this book is lovingly dedicated.
— William L. Kuykendall.
FOREWORD
The quaint and unique style characteristic of Judge William Littlebury Kuykendall has been carefully preserved in the editing of this remarkable biography. He was a well educated, widely read, courteous gentleman of the old school and he had a vocabulary which belonged to the strenuous days and environment in which he lived. He died before the publication of his autobiography and therefore never wrote the expose of the political life to which he refers in this manuscript. This book makes no pretense of carrying a continuous story, or of writing history in a chronological sequence. It is a group of incidents well told but hung loosely together, the only thing binding them being the sturdy character of the Judge himself.
Incidentally it deals with the dramatic story of the Kansas and Missouri Border trouble, the birth of the Civil War and the early pioneer history of Wyoming and the Dakotas, with marvelous pen sketches of western Indians, empire builders, the vultures of mining camps, and the life of new and raw communities, better than it could ever be told except by one who had lived the life and who could write in the language of those who had lived it.
He has put wonderful “splotches” of local color into the story of his adventures.
CONTENTS