I have a book by author Charles B. Roth, which is the supposed buffalo hunting memoirs of a Col. Frank H. Mayer which is entitled The Buffalo Harvest.
It is a quite widely printed up book which started out as a magazine article in 1932 and after Mayer died in Fairplay, Colorado, at age 104 in 1954, Roth published this book in 1958. As I was primarily interested in content of the clothing, bedrolls and the weapons platforms of the Buffalo Runners, I never really took this story apart, as Mayer is like most German Americans, in knowing it all for you and deciding the way it was.
What caught my attention recently was the "colonel" rank which Frank Mayer and Charles Roth bestowed upon him. With the state militias of that era, a turnip with money could become an officer in the military, and that is how numbers became officers on the plains or Civil War.
Buffalo Bill Cody for example as Col. Cody, but he indeed did serve as a scout in the Union forces as a child, and he went undercover into Confederate states along with Wild Bill, so there is a background for some "ranks", but numbers of ranks were just paid for as a person had money and could raise a group of idiots to follow them or some politician owed the guy some favor.
There are problems in Frank Mayer as he starts out or Roth does speaking about the Civil War and all these young men streaming onto the plains for adventure in this 1870 period, which is indeed when this did take place.
Mayer was born in Louisiana in 1850. His story starts in 1872 at age 22, which is fine.....the problem starts for the astute in the math.
The Civil War occurred from 1861 to 1865. That would mean Mayer was age 11 to age 15 in this Civil War restless generation if he had served.
There were no 11 year old colonels nor 15 year old colonels in the Union or Confederate militaries.
I checked in the book, and Mayer lists his occupations of market hunter, surveyor, mining engineer, rancher, magazine editor and novelist. In absolutely no guise is Soldier listed.
Examine those years again, as Gen. Custer of Michigan was a West Point graduate and by courageous death defying acts, rose to the rank of general to become a "boy General" as the press celebrated him.
After the war, fast moving up in rank was stalemated, and Gen. Custer was reduced in rank and pay by jealous contemporaries to Lt. Col., a rank he stayed after outstanding feats of bravery and victory in the Indian Wars from 1865 to 1876. That is 11 years the military did not promote the General.
As that benchmark, we can astutely deduct that no child was an officer in the Civil War as colonel in 1865, and Mayer could not have enlisted a private or graduated from West Point, which no record shows, and risen in 7 years to become a bird colonel.
This then means that Frank Mayer had to after the 1870's been in the military, and yet he was not, so his title of Col. is beyond suspect, as it would have been some self appointed rank of Colonel of the cowchips of Colorado and a rank it is highly doubtful the people of Colorado were shelling out a huge salary for with no wars taking place and a Mayer with no experience at war.
Mayer also notes he had 2000 dollars in a Philadelphia bank in 1872 which he withdrew for his "buffalo runner outfit" complete with a cost list for wagons and rifles.
Once again, Frank Mayer was a child in this era even at age 22. Yet let us take him up on the 2000 dollar figure, knowing that people were paid 30 dollars a month for being teamsters to a military low rank of private.
30 divides into 2000 dollars, 66 times plus change. That means 66 months or 5 and one half years, meaning if Frank Mayer had saved every nickle and lived on nothing as a child, he would have been working from 16 1/2 years of age to just get that 2000 dollars.
Granted he could have inherited it, but he never states where this revenue comes from, so once again the Mayer numbers do not exactly meet the Donald Trump and Gen. Patraeus child proteges of commerce and war.
There is technical data in the book which is correct on Sharp's rifles and enough salted in mentions of Col. Dodge and Billy Dixon, with slaps at Buffalo Bill, to make Mayer the expert, but as all the contemporaries were dead..............who was there to discount the real story in this, as Frank Mayer for being such an expert and man about the world of the plains, never was mentioned in Billy Dixon's, Col. Dodge's, Elizabeth Custer's, nor any other newspaper account of that time.
Something seems highly suspect in this, in Frank Mayer might well have been on the plains and hunted buffalo, but was a bit more embellished than actually took place.......including meeting Frederick Remington and claiming that Remingtons' Buffalo Wallow fight was "Mayers".
You can bluff a whole lot of people by being absolutely certain about things, and bluff a generation which never was on the plains, but the problem is in numbers and stories, that Frank Mayer's just do not quite add up at times, and hint at the same embellishment of people who used to claim to be Jesse James.
You do know that the Lonesome Dove series by that writer actually stole most of that information from Col. Washington Irving Dodge now did you not? That Larry McMurtry made a fortune off of other people's lives in the danger they faced.
The problem in this is Frank Mayer has literally shown up on PBS as a historic fact.
I never met Frank Mayer nor Charles Roth, but what this all begins to look like is an embellishment of an old man, who after all the people who lived that life were dead, started becoming the expert in doing some research to add to his experiences, which he did indeed could have had as riding across the plains like Francis Parkman for one summer wrote the Oregon Trail.
To add a personal note, I once met a Mississippi female who had all sorts of stories on being raped etc.... that after some time, I was speaking to her best friend, who told me, "She told you that? That stuff happened to me".
The fish in the boat on the lake that one loses, becomes the state record after one arrives home, and with a few beers, retelling and all the witnesses disappear, it becomes an international record.
The old west was a place filled with people who for sport created the most exaggerated blessed stories to impress pilgrims. Old Gabe would tell people that mountains grew from rocks out west, as he threw a rock at a jackrabbit one year and when he came back a butte had grown up.
Gen. Custer and Col. Tom Custer had a splendid time tormenting their brother from Michigan named Boston. On the Black Hills expedition, Tom assured Bos, that the west was full of "water rocks", and that if Bos picked these certain rocks up, and soaked them in water, they would absorb water........and the kid could get a drink from them.
Boston finally figured out after 3 days he had been had. This kind of bullsh*t is what makes up western Americans. If they like you, they will pester the hell out of you, and if they are silent, they hate you and want you to go away.
Mayer really never goes into in Indian fights, but mentions a few, which is suspect in these could have been fights he was told of by friends, as many were, and Indian fights were always good fodder around the campfires.
In that, I conclude that Frank Mayer was an embellisher, looking for attention, and after he died, Charles Roth, really embellished with some clever research to make some money off of a story like the New York Times writers did.
It is easy then to be right about things, as all the experts who lived it were dead and are not around to say, "Why I knew you...........you were the guy who used to shovel the stables for us."
Well when the facts do not add up, print the legend. PBS is good about that as they come up with Ken Burns' fiction often enough to warp the citizenry's minds.
*Amazing how Billy Dixon and Francis Parkman went into specific details about their camp crews in names, identities and backgrounds, but Frank Mayer just mentions his 'skinners' and he could keep them together as he paid them all well.
I suppose so well their names were Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Carnegie and Ford..........all courtesy of Col. Frank Mayer's buffalo billion dollar bucks traveling road show.
PBS really needs to pull that story until more of it can be verified........as Mayer's account does not add up.
agtG 252
