- from 'the War Budget', August 23rd, 1917
- 'Cherokee Indian Officer
- in Princess Pats Canadian Battalion'
- Facts Stranger than Fenimore Cooper Fiction
Comes a story from the Western Front that might well call Fenimore Cooper back to the would of romance. Even that weird storyteller could hardly have imagined so startling a career as the true life history of Sylvester Chahuska Long Lance, a Cherokee Indian now on the borders of No Man's Land.
It takes all sorts to make a host of Armageddon, but there are few samples of the twentieth century soldier more entertaining than a thoroughbred Cherokee, like Lieut. Long Lance, of "Princess Pat's" battalion.
If the chances of war go in his favour Long Lance should have many years in which to talk of his adventures by his wigwam fire. He comes of a line whose days have been long in the land, two of his ancestors having passed the hundred-and-twelfth milestone.
Long Lance's training for the role of hero at Vimy Ridge has been of the most kaleidoscopic character. At the age of thirteen he went as a trick rider with a Wild West troupe. Two years later he started on a professional boxing career, soon being able to meet all comers. Blessed with brain as well as brawn, the young Indian developed such a taste for learning that President Wilson, gave him one of the six coveted Presidential appointments at West Point.
That was a little more than two years ago, and before Long Lance went into residence as a student he was caught in the Canadian recruiting net and changed the classroom for the camp. In the meantime, the volatile Redskin had become famous as an allround athlete, a prize debater, musician, cinema actor, compositor, and President of a Y.M.C.A. His school fees were earned by work as a railway clerk during the school vacations. In the course of a brief sketch of this romantic Cherokee's career, the "World" reproduces a letter written by him at the Front a few weeks ago, while lying in a field hospital.
"I am convalescing from a wound in the head received a couple of weeks ago," he writes. "Nothing serious; only a piece of shrapnel in the back part of the head and a broken nose - the latter sustained in falling on my face, I presume. I came through the April 9th scrap (Vimy Ridge) without a scratch, being the only officer of my rank left an any company, only to get hit a month later on one of the quietest days we have had lately. Such is war!
"Anyway, I find the open warfare, which has ensued since we took Vimy Ridge, is much more interesting and endurable than the trench stuff that we had to tolerate all winter. We are able to see miles behind Fritz's lines now, whereas, during the winter, a few yards of No-Man's Land and the German front line was the visual limit from our trenches.
"I am enjoying the green trees and sunny hillsides surrounding the hospital here, after so many dreary months in the drab trenches. One would hardly know that there was a war on if it were not for the distant rumble of the heavies and the drone of the battle planes overhead. We-have Fritz on the run now, and we are holding all the trump cards, as far as I can see from observations here. Fritz personally, is getting pretty well 'fed up' with war. It is not infrequent that he voluntarily comes over and surrenders-when he gets a chance to sneak from his own lines."
The letter is interesting as showing how completely a white man's education has eradicated the "Fenimore Cooper" elements from the redskin's speech. Most readers would have preferred the language of Chingatchgook, or the poetic phrases of Hiawatha, of which there is no trace in Long Lance's prosaic epistle. "I presume" and "visual limit'' are scarcely appropriate expressions for a wigwam palaver.
But the soldier spirit seems identical under two forms of dress and speech, as dissimilar as the two photos of our hero reproduced above.
