Jasper County Democrat, Volume 1, Number 31, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 November 1898 — TOO GOOD FOR THE ARMY. I [ARTICLE]

TOO GOOD FOR THE ARMY. I

Athletic Cadet Who Licked Almoat Everybody at West Point That prize fight between a pair of cadets at the Annapolis naval acad--1 emy the other day reminded a member of congress from Missouri of a boy - , , , ’ ■ pnd sent to he selected la his West JPoint eight years agO t “The young ’uh was' fl pretty smooth altlci* a hoy/’ gressman, “and he Easily popped the dozen of fld of other boys in thy ojfcy trict who tooktlie coinpetitiVe exaim 7 ’ ination for the appointment Ih the, army school. Although I had noticed the boy gallumphing around likeother boys in my neck o’ the woodspractically since he was able to walk, I never knew that he was very much, on the fight. “But he began to make things hum in the fighting line from the very first day he struck West Point. The other little snoozers in the sawed-off uniforms began to rub it in on him, likethe cadets treat all new arrivals, as soon as he got there. But they couldn’t make it stick with him at all. He wouldn’t stand for any mauling around whatever. He lambasted half a dozen of his tormentors good and hard the first day. “The next day they went at. him in a body, and he met them as they came with his bunk irons. He landed a slew of them in the hospital for repairs during this whirl and got himself in the guardhouse besides. When he was released the other kids in his class let him alone for awhile, but one day two of the bigger boys went at him together-. He put them out in jig time one after another. “Then the boys of the class ahead thought they’d try out this cadet of mine. Re slugged a majority of them, big . and little, in less than a week after they came to this determination, and then I began to receive reports about the boy. One day, not long after, he publicly punched a young man of the senior class, and it cost m 4 a lot of trouble to keep him at the academy. “I began to wonder what I could do to hold him at the point in case he, should take it into his head to biitthe commanding officer on the parade ground. But he permitted peace to brood over the army training establishment for as much aa two weekly and then one morning I read in the papers that he had whaled two cadet noncommissioned officers of the guard, of which he was a private, and. that he had been fired from the academy. “When he got back to his home in my district a half dozen or so of the young chaps, including my own son, started to give it to him about his being chucked out of the academy in disgrace. He thrashed every one of ’em in precisely three minutes, giving my own boy the worst beating of the lot, and I was glad of it. “I begun to stand by for him to lick me next, but he didn’t do it, and he treated me very considerately, on th® whole. The boy pitched in and won a scholarship at a Chicago polytechnic, and, after man-handling the whole outfit with his fists for a couple of years, he won out at the head of hi* class as a mining engineer. “Last summer he went to the Klondike, and now I am constantly expecting to hear that he has cleaned nut tha whole Northwest territory, that he has been riddled in a gun play with* few United States deputy marshals; that he has extinguished the whole species of polar bears, or that he ha* picked up enough dust to organise a little army of his own when he get* back to Missouri.”—Washington Post.