DescriptionSeth Bullock Obituary.jpg	English: Obituary of Seth Bullock
Date	24 September 1919
Source	The evening world., September 24, 1919, Final Edition, Image 18
Author	Lindsay Denison
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Sheriff Seth Bullock, "Last of the Pioneers," Was Real Westerner. Death Yesterday Ended Remarkable Career of Real Man Whose Rugged Character Won the Friendship of a President, and Whose Thrilling Adventures With Outlaws and Indians Would Make a Stirring Book. By Lindsay Denison. Cantisht. 1,19. in The Press Publinklus l'.•. iThe New long E►ting algid), 0 N the prairie near the Missouri River bridge at Chamberlain almost. twenty yea ago there was at sunrise a round-up circle of Norui western politicians and cattle and mining men in the first rat 4 after dawn, waiting to Bee Theodore Roosevelt, who was then Governor of the State of New York and candidate for Vice-Presideitt. In the very centre of the circle, acting as informal Chairman, was Seth Bullock. It was the first time any except intimate friends of Roosevelt in the East had seen or heard of Seth Bullock. As the tenderfeet who accompanied Roosevelt as stenographers, report-ers and spellbinders alighted from the train the circle opened to admit them to Bullock's Inspection and they were formally Introduced. Ile was gravely courteous In acknowledging the intr.). duction, shifting a rakish black /cigar, atilt through his heavy thatch of mustache, from one corner of his sardonic mouth to the other without any total* of his fingers, and bowing slightly. After a moment or two of I his eagle glance of apppraisal most of them stepped back behind the line In-voluntarily. The last to be brought from the train on the siding on which the Roosevelt party had spent the night was a youthful graduate of Yale v..110 a are a straw hat with a lovely blue striped band, a creamy flannel suit and blue socks and was smoking la ciarette. IThe old-time Sheriff walked around him without changing his expression. He did not look at the blue hat band, but the young man took the hat cuff and held It behind him; he did not look at the .socks, but the youth wriggled MO the hem of his trousers would drop lower over them, and be let the cigarette drop from his lips. "I am very glad to have 'seen you, sir," said Seth Bullock, with the dryest of solemn cordiality. "And now, men," he adied addressing the crowd, "there's a man front the East bak vomit r I've been sitting up all night to see and I guess he In up by this time." And ,he walked back to Roosevelt's I car, where he occupied a berth during the rest of the touring how my grandmother on her dying bed never tom me noteilw about holding up my hands when a man came at me like that, when the lead mules jack-knifed around to the left, and then jack-knifed back again to the right and started back up the gulch and ran all the way back into Deadwood. We never lost a cent." Seth Bullock was then well over He spoke slowly, always with a reme fifty. Thcre wtra streaks of gray in iniscent pleasure in his tone, but with-his mustache. which drooped heavily i out any story-teller's affectation. We at the corners of his mouth. His eye- alined a long time. Then somebody brows were bushier than most men's mustaches, Hie sharply chiselled naset "But what did the man down in the hooked like an eagle's beak over his gulch do? 1)id he shout again? What thin lipped mouth. His eyes either I became of hitn?" twinkled or burned; they were never Indifferent "Ile'm just one ef the old-tiers," raid tIu liticians. "Teddy likes him, but his kind has passed." "Seth Bullock," said Roosevelt, when the old man was long enough out of sight to make talk about him comfortable, "is the West in which 1 came out to live twenty years ago. Ile is one of the very last of the pioneers. If ti is clean American of a type which has made the West what it Is and which the Westethough it does not )et know it—can never afford to forget." Seth Bullock- went from peaceful Michigan to the Black tildls of South Dakota in the gold hunting days tl 109. lir W alS the first. Sheriff of the district. When in the mood he had an unending store of wild and woolly anecdotes covering anything from Indian fighting to stage robbery and l) aching parties These rare periods of reminiscence usually followed the appearance in the itinerary of the Roosevelt campaign train of a moss-whiskered, wound-seared veteran of the rough-and-tumble pioneer days who came "down to the railroad track" from fifty to five hundred miles to "get a look at Teddy," and, on encountering Seth Bullock, engaged in a mutual reunion of !blisteringly affectionate invective anti criminal libel, to the great joy of all privileged to hear. Of himself the old Sheriff would hardly ever talk. In ten years more or tiepin intiinate acquaintance renewed annually In New York, Washington or the Blank Hills, the writer ean remember but three times when Seth talked about himself. Once wit54 when lie told his often published story of the train robbers' ;that& on the Wells Fargo 'bullion coach from Deadwood to Cheyenne. He was sitting with the driver, "Wes" when the stage dipped down into the gulch into the Hack shadows of the moonlight. el was uncommonly nervous," he said, "because 'Wes' kept talking about the $65.000 we had on and the chances of being held up. Never did like 'Wes,' anyway. Just as we started down into the gulch he meld he guessed If we were to be held up, this was the place. It made me mighty uneasy. "And. sure enough, just as we got to the bottom a. man jumps out from some jack pines with a handkerchief across him face and. yells: stild up your liandar 1 way just ituittiater-"lie didn't do a thine'," said Seth, rising with a (roan of disatipitaval. vi'lleby sent out Neil found him next day and buried Ions. I le ita.s 411101." Seth Bullock liad a deep knowledge of the Sioux. He spoke of them zt-h; ways with a baffling mittu! of appreciation and biting irony. He was particularly fond of tenpin's; praise on Hollow Horn Bear of the Rosebud Sioux, the silver-tongued orator of ills nation, whose featiwr4rarnted fe auroa were imprinted on the $1 bilk for mussy years. !follow Horn lobar enjoyeli these tributes enormously. The write" could never get the joke until after several eas he reeesed a telegraia front Bullock inviting him to a Dyad-wood festivity. tot; !Orions rt.% I% al of I n tionm and history and ra iityval of ancient customs with unpreetslainteI innovations," it ran. "'Hollow Horn Bear will change his shirt." For two weeks the writer stealthily tried to stalk himself into a position to start Seth Bullock to writing lie, autobiography. The nearest we ever came to it was when Seth pointed out a ragged grave on the ridge above Deadwood Gulch and said: "That's where the Sioux got the minister a week after I got into the hills. We had an awful time getting to him, too. It was one of the toughest funerals I ever saw." In his later yearn some If Seth's out niining claims "came true." Roosevelt a made him United states Marshal. Taft renewed the appointment after I3ullark had. painstakingly explained that hi, was a Roosevelt man first, last and all the time. The appearances of Capt. Bullock (he was an officer of Grigsby*" Third Rough Riders) was* always the occasion for Roosevelt to assemble those of his friends who sympathized with his love of the plains and the Rockies. "Come to lunch," such an invitation would run. "Seth Bullock is to be here and three or four pot-bellied persons from the Senate. I feel that those of us who know Seth will have a good time and what the Senatora do not know will not hurt them." Bullock spent his declining years in a little frame home on a siJe Et recut in Deadwood looking out on the commercialized spirit of the new We in kindly irony. To the very last the menace of his Wrath agetinkit evil-doers was sufficient to keep the Ms-triet Howev much youth and self .;utticicney might nsur-:war against loin us a "has-been" 134; wan still the "Law iu the IP tele Ifiliss° ,‘ It