Rensselaer Republican, Volume 20, Number 10, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 November 1887 — AMONG THE COW-BOYS. [ARTICLE]

AMONG THE COW-BOYS.

Strange Experience of a Runaway New York Woman. i. ' —— v New York special. — A ugusta Loesner, a beautiful, buxom blonde of twenty years, who came from Saxony in 1884, was met and wooed and won almost immediately by Xavier Gramer, a widower with six children, and about fifteen years her senior, and he took her to his home in Brooklyn. The new wife soon had’numbers of admirers, and as she and the children could not get along together she eloped with a cow-boy and started for the far West.

A few months ago Gramer received from his wife a letter dated Walla Walla Washington Territory,reciting an almost incredible story of adventure and nomadic life that, while it was interesting, showed Mr. Gramer A way to a permanent release from the matrimonial bonds which still theoretically bound them together. She wrote that she had gone to Detroit and joined interests with a party of emigrants bound for Idaho, where they proposed to engage in farming. On the way across the plains she learned how to ride and shoot as became a pioneer woman. The emigrants were disappointed about getting the land they had intended to settle upon as homesteaders, and so determined to go on further and engage in stock-raising. Mrs. Gramer went with them, assisting at the cooking and camp work when they were in camp, and driving and herding while on the march.

One day thej>arty learnedthatbuffaloes were in herd not far distant, and the men were wild to get a shot at them. Mrs. Gramer insisted upon going with them, and although they tried to persuade her to remain with the wagons, she was obdurate, and they concluded by taking her along. -Mounted on an ugly little mustang, and carrying a light rifle across her saddle, she rode with the men until the game came in sight, when in the consequent excitement and commotion she became separated from the party, and her mustang stumble she was thrown and had her leg broken. She lay helpless for severa hours in a slight depression in the ground, suffering excruciating pain, when a band of Snake Indians, who had been hunting the buffalo, came along and discovered her, \ They took her up tenderly, and a half breed medicine man among them managed to set the broken limb. Making a litter for her of long poles and wicker work, that was trailed along on the ground behind a pony, the Indians took her with them on their journey toward the Columbia River. During her convalescence she was the recipient of distinguished attentions from the chief of the band, who proposed to install her as the head of his household. But feigning greater weakness and suffering than were real, she threw the Indians off their guard, and when opportunity presented itself she seized a mustang and effected her escape to a band of cowboys in the near neighborhood, by whom she was given an enthusiastic welcome. She was the only woman within many miles, and she was treated with the utmost gallantry by the semi-civilized stock raisers, who banded over to her the charge of their camp. She writes that she is delighted with the wild, free life she is leading among the cowboys, by whom she is treated like a Queen, and whom she invests with a nobility and gallantry she did not find prevalent among the denizens of Brooklyn. She said she would never return to civilized society again. Mr. Gramer had begun an action for a divorce absolute, and the summons by publication having been yesterday returned properly executed, the case was set down for an early hearing.