Excerpt from Musings of the Pilgrim Bard: A Book of Poems

As an old time friend and neighbor who has known and admired the Pilgrim Bard for nearly a quarter of a century, I write this brief sketch as a labor of love.

Orange Scott Cummins was born in the good old state of Ohio fifty-seven years ago, but at the early age of two years he concluded that it was the part of wisdom for a young man to go west and grow up with the country, and taking his par ents by the hand he started for the then new state of Iowa. It was a wilderness where the family settled. Indians were plentiful and here the future bard became acquainted with the Noble Red Man. The wild free life of the savage appealed to the romantic temperament of the boy. Young Indians were often his playmates. In the Indian camps 'he spent much of his time, and long before he had reached the estate of manhood he was familiar with Indian customs and Indian legends. This fact was probably responsible for the story that was set afloat that a white baby died and that the Indian chief, Gonoe, sympathizing with the grief-stricken mother, brought to her a handsome Indian pappoose which the white mother took and reared as her own, and that in course of years this pappoose grew up to be a poet. This tale, how ever, is legendary. I doubt its authenticity.

When the war broke out young Cummins, though hardlyfifteen, burned with a patriotic desire to be a soldier, and a soldier he became. 'as a member of Con. A, 3d Iowa cavalry, he served his country well. At the end of the war he came back to Iowa, but the restlessness of the frontiersman was in his blood. Neighbors had become too plentiful in Iowa and he moved to Kansas. In the early seventies he settled among the canyons of Barber county, at that time the favor ite grazing ground of countless thousands of buffalo and the chosen habitation of the deer, the antelope, the wolf and the mountain lion.

On the banks of a clear running and beautiful little stream, which bore the unromantic cognomen of Mule creek, he built his cabin, naming it Last Chance, because it was the last chance the pilgrims heading for the still further western wilds would have to get a meal under a roof.

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