Captain Jack Crawford was a rough-hewn explorer of the Black Hills, a soldier of fortune, and a sidekick of Buffalo Bill Cody and Wild Bill Hickok. He also wrote beautiful poetry.

    Captain Jack gained fame as the "Poet Scout," but he never planned it that way. Until the Civil War, Crawford was illiterate. Battle wounds put him in a union hospital and while there a nurse taught him to read and write.

    In 1875 Captain Jack came to the Black Hills as a reporter for the New York Herald and may have been the region's first newspaper correspondent. He reached the Hills on a horse loaned to him by Joseph Gossage of Sidney, Nebraska. Gossage later founded the Rapid City Journal.

    Captain Jack was chief of scouts under General Crook during the Battle of the Little Big Horn. It's said that jack was riding to Custer's headquarters with dispatches when the 7th Cavalry was wiped out. Later the "Poet Scout" toured with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. Through it all he kept composing poems and plays.

    After an absence of several years, Captain Jack made his last visit to Rapid City in 1893. He liked the town, and dedicated a poem to his "Foot Hills Queen." Captain Jack was dismayed at how fast things were changing, ended the poem with this warning:

Remember Rome was not erected in a day

You maybe Rapid, yet I thought it strange

That some were roaring for a rabid change

Sustain the good old name will time shall last

Be Rapid always-but be not to fast.

10/01/03