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'''Luther Sage "Yellowstone" Kelly''' (July 27, 1849 – December 17, 1928) was an American soldier, hunter, scout, adventurer and administrator. He served briefly in the [[American Civil War]] and then in an 1898 expedition to [[Alaska]]. He commanded a [[U.S. Army]] [[Company (military unit)|company]] in the [[Philippine-American War]] and later served in the civilian administration of the [[Philippines]]. ==Early life== Luther Sage "[[Yellowstone]]" Kelly was born July 27, 1849, in [[Geneva, New York]].<ref name = "webster213">{{cite book|title = Webster's American Military Biographies | publisher = G & C Merriam Company | location = Springfield, Massachusetts | year = 1978 | isbn = 0-87779-063-9 | page = 213}}</ref> His father, also named Luther Kelly, owned a drug and grocery store in Geneva. His mother, Jeanette Eliza Sage, was the daughter of Colonel Hezekiah Sage of nearby [[Chittenango]].<ref>{{cite book|title = The Life of Yellowstone Kelly | first = Jerry | last = Keenan | publisher = [[University of New Mexico Press]] | pages = 7–8 | year = 2006}}</ref> Kelly's father died on February 14, 1857, leaving him the man of the family, but the family had enough money saved to live comfortably.<ref>Keenan (2006), pp. 11 -12</ref> In either late 1864 or early 1865, Kelly entered the Geneva Wesleyan Seminary,<ref>Keenan (2006), p. 13</ref> but his real interest was in joining the army and fighting in the Civil War; he would later write that he "deplored the fact" that his youth rendered him unfit for military service at that time.<ref>{{cite book|title = Yellowstone Kelly: The Memoirs of Luther S. Kelly | first = Luther | last = Kelly | editor1-first = M.M. | editor1-last = Quaife | publisher = Bison Books | year = 1973}}</ref> ==Military service== In the spring of 1865, with the Civil War winding down, Kelly secured permission from his mother to join the Army. He traveled to [[Rochester, New York]], where he attempted to join the Fourth New York Cavalry but was turned down due his young age (15).<ref>Keenan (2006), p. 14</ref> Later he joined the [[10th Infantry Regiment (United States)|10th Infantry]] by lying about his age. He was unaware that the 10th Infantry was not a volunteer corps and that he would be obliged to continue serving after the war.<ref name = "webster213"/> Kelly was sent to [[City Point, Virginia]]. After [[Robert E. Lee]]'s [[surrender at Appomattox]] his regiment was sent to [[Richmond, Virginia|Richmond]] and then marched towards [[Washington, D.C.]], encamping south of the [[Potomac River]] until after the [[Grand Review of the Armies]]. Because Kelly's unit had not participated in the Grand Review, it was selected for a parade through Washington on June 8, during which Kelly served as part of the guard detail for the reviewing officer, "his first official duty of any real consequence".<ref>Keenan (2006), pp. 15 -16</ref> Kelly's unit was stationed in Washington over the summer. In November they were moved by train to [[St. Paul, Minnesota]] to be stationed at [[Fort Snelling]] for the winter.<ref>Keenan (2006), p. 17</ref> In May, his company moved among [[Fort Abercrombie]], [[Fort Wadsworth]] and [[Fort Ransom]], all in the [[Dakota Territory]]. During his free time at these forts, Kelly hunted game to provide fresh meat for his fellow soldiers. In April 1868, Kelly's enlistment in the Army ended, and he was discharged at Fort Ransom. ==American Western Frontier 1868-1885== [[File:KellyDuel.jpg|left|350px|thumb|Kelly's duel with two Sioux warriors, as depicted by Charles Russell]] After leaving the army, Kelly embarked on what ''[[The New York Times]]'' later called "the most adventurous period of his life", establishing himself as "one of the greatest hunters, trappers, and Indian scouts" of the American West. He first traveled to [[Fort Garry]], now [[Winnipeg]] in Canada, where he joined a group of miners, traveling with them to the [[Red River of the North|Red River]], where he spent the winter. He left the miners to cross the [[Assiniboine River]], falling in with a group headed toward the [[Mouse River]]. After meeting [[Sitting Bull]] with this group, Kelly and headed alone toward the [[Missouri River]], eventually reaching [[Fort Buford]] in the winter. Not long after his arrival at Fort Buford, Kelly volunteered to carry dispatches to [[Fort Stevenson]], approximately fifty miles down the Missouri River. He left the fort on February 5, 1869. The route between the forts was considered so dangerous, due to the presence of [[Sioux]] warriors, that mail carriers were generally accompanied by a cavalry escort, but Kelly set out alone. He arrived safely at Fort Stevenson then set out on his return journey, spending the night at the camp of [[Bloody Knife]], an Arickaree chieftain. The next morning, Kelly was ambushed by two Sioux warriors. The first wounded Kelly's horse with a rifle, while the second shot Kelly in the knee with an arrow. Kelly managed to shoot and kill the first attacker quickly, but the second took cover behind a tree. Kelly eventually shot and killed his second assailant, then returned to Bloody Knife's camp to tell the story. Kelly spent a few days at Bloody Knife's camp recovering from his wound, then rode back to Fort Buford, becoming "something of a hero and a local celebrity" for defeating his two assailants. [[22 Jan 1878]]] Kelly was in Bismarck recently. He had been at Berthold looking for information on Indian movements was told that they had probably moved north. On his way to [[Fort Buford]] his face was badly frozen in a severe blizzard. He then made it to the [[Fort Keogh]]. ==Alaska expedition, 1898== Although the United States had purchased Alaska from [[Russia]] in 1867, Americans were not interested in it until gold was discovered there in 1896.<ref>Keenan p. 168</ref> In 1898 the U.S. Army deployed three separate units under the commands of Captains Bogardus Eldridge, [[William R. Abercrombie]], and Edwin F. Glenn to map a route from the [[Yukon]], scout the [[Copper River (Alaska)|Copper River]] Valley, and conduct reconnaissance. They would begin near the [[Prince William Sound]] and work toward the interior.<ref>Keenan p. 169</ref> Kelly was assigned to Glenn's unit as an interpreter and guide. Departing [[Seattle]] by ship on April 7, 1898, they arrived along the Alaskan coastline approximately five days later. While unloading and preparing for the expedition, they received news of the outbreak of the [[Spanish-American War]] on April 23.<ref>Keenan p. 175</ref> Eldridge's unit was ordered to return to its [[regiment]], while Abercrombie and Glenn's parties were to continue their assigned missions. Although the other soldiers were eager to return to their regiments to join the war, they reasoned that it would be mostly a naval war with little role for the Army.<ref>Keenan p. 176</ref> Support for the expedition dwindled in light of the American public's enthusiasm for the war.<ref>Keenan p. 172</ref> In accordance with President [[William McKinley]]'s request for additional men for the war, Kelly was offered a commission as a captain in the [[U.S. Volunteers]]. Kelly departed Alaska on October 9, and Glenn's unit continued its mission until November 10. By the time Kelly arrived back in Seattle the war had ended, and with it his captaincy. The Army's expedition into Alaska was largely overshadowed by the war in the public eye and in contemporary historians' accounts. It made possible the completion in 1923 of the [[Alaska Railroad]], which followed the route mapped by the 1898 expedition.<ref>Keenan p. 195</ref> A year later came the maritime [[Harriman Alaska Expedition]]. ==Philippine-American War== In August 1899 Kelly received another commission as a captain, this time with the Army's 40th Volunteers, following Congress's authorization of an increase in the Army by 35,000 men to put down the insurgency in the Philippines.<ref>Keenan p. 198, 216, 202</ref> This war, unlike the six-month war with Spain with 500 combat deaths, "would drag on for three long years"<ref>Keenan p. 202</ref> and cost the lives of over 4,000 U.S. servicemen. The 40th Regiment departed from [[Fort Riley]], [[Kansas]], by train in November 1899 for [[California]]. After two weeks there, they shipped out from the [[Presidio]], arriving in the [[Philippines]] in late December 1899.<ref>Keenan p. 217</ref> Kelly's company was under the command of [[Brigadier General]] [[James Bell (Medal of Honor)|James Bell]], who had served with Kelly during the [[Nez Perce War|Nez Perce campaigns]] of the [[Indian Wars]]. Captain Kelly's company aboard the vessel ''Venus'' departed [[Manila]] along with four other transports headed for the shores of [[San Miguel Bay]]. From there the companies began their marches inland to clear the areas of insurgents. Kelly's company met heavy resistance on the outskirts of the town of LaLud. Insurgents under the command of a Colonel Legaspi<ref name="Keenan p. 226">Keenan p. 226</ref> opened fire on Kelly's advancing infantrymen with two [[field guns]], but Kelly's men managed to kill the enemy [[artillerymen]] and silence the guns. With heavy foliage flanking the enemy's position, Kelly led a frontal assault and routed them. In the process, Kelly captured Legaspi's ceremonial Spanish sword.<ref name="Keenan p. 226"/> Kelly later served in the administration of the new civilian governor of the Philippines, future President [[William Howard Taft]]. By 1903, as Kelly wrote to a friend, "I have been in the Philippines so long now (3 years)... this country is a wearing one... my health is excellent, but three years is the limit."<ref>Keenan p. 242</ref> On November 15, 1903, Kelly was relieved of his duties in the Philippines and ordered to report back to [[Washington, D.C.]], for his next assignment, as [[Indian Agent]] for the [[San Carlos Indian Reservation]] in [[Arizona]]. Kelly died in 1929. He was buried with the sword he captured from Legaspi at LaLud. ==Billings Gazette article== Fresh out of the Army in 1868, Luther Sage “Yellowstone” Kelly embarked on a 12-year journey through the northern Plains that made him a legend in his own time. He’s less well-known now for his pivotal role in taming the last frontier. But ongoing efforts to raise money to restore his gravesite high on the Rimrocks overlooking the city have brought him to public attention once again. Kelly would have been stunned at the sprawling city of more than 100,000 people spread below his lonely crypt. When he first knew this part of the Yellowstone River Valley, its only inhabitants were Native American nomads and a handful of trappers and traders. He was 18 when he set out to explore the river courses that crossed Montana — the Missouri, Milk, Musselshell, Judith, Yellowstone, Powder and Tongue to name a few. “The scene was exhilarating,” Kelly wrote in his memoirs. “The dark bodies of the buffalos as they moved in clusters or singly; the combative bulls raising a dust cloud as they came together, contrasted with the light-colored antelopes on the outskirts, ready to give alarm at a moment’s notice.” Well-educated for his day and a voracious reader when he could borrow books from Army officers and friends, the frontiersman’s autobiography — printed in his old age in the 1920s — is a vivid, literary chronicle of his long and adventurous life. The Geneva, N.Y., native had lied about his age and enlisted in the Army at 15, hoping to see action in the Civil War. But the war ended just as he was prepared to take the field. By 1866, he was on his way to forts along the Missouri in Dakota Territory. Enchanted by this big, strange country, Kelly left the Army when his three years were up and set off alone to explore. Fort Buford, just across the Montana line, was his base of operations early in his post-Army career — just as Fort Keogh, near Miles City, would be later when he embarked on scouting missions in the aftermath of the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876. But long before he began chasing Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, Kelly was learning how to survive alone in the wilderness. In a matter of a few years, he knew Eastern Montana and its inhabitants better than anyone who hadn’t been born here. Among those he encountered in the initial phase of his travels was Sitting Bull, a Lakota chief, and his band of warriors. Kelly guessed the storied war leader to be about 30 years old with “a round, pleasant face, and wore a headscarf of dirty white clothe. I suspected that the stiff leather cases tied to some of the saddles contained war bonnets, as I saw feathers sticking out of the pouches.” It was a tense encounter, as Sitting Bull and a band of Hunkpapa warriors surrounded the trading party Kelly had joined. Kelly remembered that the warriors were armed with rifles, shotguns and bows and arrows. They boasted that they had just killed a white man at the mouth of the Yellowstone. Kelly spent the fall and winter at Fort Buford chopping wood and hunting game for the Army. In February 1869 two soldiers carrying mail to Fort Stevenson (now under Lake Sakakawea in North Dakota) and back were late returning and feared dead. When the post commander at Buford asked for volunteers to carry important messages to Fort Stevenson, none of the soldiers wanted any part of it. Kelly, much to the amusement of more experienced frontier hands, volunteered. “I was in need of employment,” he wrote. He set off at dusk alone so that he could travel the most dangerous part of the road at night. The air was frosty, Kelly recalled and snow covered every trail. But he got to Fort Stevenson without encountering any war parties and successfully delivered the mail. The trip back, however, was no easy walk in the wilderness. He spent the first night at the cabin of tapper Red Mike Welch. Also visiting Welch was an Arikara hunting party that included Bloody Knife, who would later become Lt. Col. George A. Custer’s favorite scout and die with him at the Little Bighorn. The next day, Kelly headed through the cottonwoods along the Missouri and out into the open plains, where he encountered two Sioux coming from the opposite direction. The warriors dismounted and sat near some large trees, waiting for Kelly to approach. When he came within 20 yards, “they suddenly rose and fired at me, one with a shotgun and the other armed with a bow and arrow,” he wrote. “About the same instant, I dropped from my horse and fired quickly as the Indian was running for cover. “He never got a chance to empty the remaining barrel of the gun, for as he ran, I fired at him without taking sight as far as I know, and he dropped.” Kelly worried that he hadn’t hit the gunman, but turned his attentions to the surviving warrior who had taken a position behind a cottonwood. The warrior didn’t have a gun, but he had a good firing position and was a master of the bow and arrow. They fired away each time the other exposed himself long enough to get off a shot. “As I backed away, my course led me where arrows were sticking in the ground on each side of my trail,” Kelly recalled. He shouted toward his opponent, asking who he was, and the warrior responded “Oglala me.” One of Kelly’s final shots broke the warrior’s arrow arm. “He rushed toward me in furry and despair, attempting meanwhile, to place an arrow on the string of his bow, but I dropped him in his tracks,” Kelly said. By the time he returned to Fort Buford, the Arikara had already passed on the tale of the duel. One of his favorite pastimes seemed to be wolfing in the Bear Paw Mountains in north-central Montana. He and a fellow wolf hunter would kill an animal for bait and lace the carcass with strychnine. They would return later and skin the wolves that had succumbed to a deadly feast. On one of these trips, Kelly spotted a buffalo bull about 30 feet away and decided his carcass would do well as bait. “But he proved to be a very lively bull, for he sprang to his feet instantly and with head down and tail up, came for me,” he wrote. “I shoot from the left shoulder, but there was no time for that operation so, quickly shifting my little Henry rifle, I held it on that grizzly ornament of his face, the forelock, heavy with sand and matted with burrs, which hung between his eyes, and when he was about 10 feet away, let him have it. He dropped in an instant.” Kelly knew Eastern Montana so well that he proved a valuable scout as the railroad tried to move west and the Indian wars began to crescendo in the 1870s. After Custer’s defeat, June 25, 1876, the government reinforced its effort to capture the free-roaming Indians, especially Sitting Bull. Among those sent north for the retribution was Col. Nelson A. Miles. He was to build a fort near the confluence of the Yellowstone and Tongue rivers. Kelly, who had been in the Judith Basin when the news of Custer’s demise arrived, headed for the Yellowstone and the new military post. As he drew near what would become Fort Keogh near Miles City, he killed a grizzly and cut off one of its giant paws. Kelly described it as “over a foot long without the claws.” When he learned Miles was in the vicinity, he sent the claw to the colonel as a calling card. Miles said in the introduction to Kelly’s memoirs that “at the time he was young and strong, as supple as a panther, with an eye like an eagle.” He was also movie-star handsome, intelligent and quiet, though apparently liked and respected by most he met. Miles immediately made Kelly chief of scouts and used his knowledge of the country in the search for warrior bands that were believed to be lingering in the Yellowstone country to hunt. The government particularly wanted to capture Sitting Bull before he could cross into Canada. The scouts worked ahead of Miles’ Fifth Infantry as it marched through fall and a fierce winter to round up the free-roaming bands and send them to reservations in the Dakotas. The thermometer at the fort site sometimes read between 40 and 50 below. Kelly demonstrated his bravery at the Battle of Wolf Mountain on the Tongue River near Birney. Miles’ troops battled warriors led by Sioux war leader Crazy Horse and Cheyenne Chief Two Moons in a January blizzard in 1877. Later that year, when Miles marched north and west to capture the Nez Perce under Chief Joseph, Kelly acted as scout. The government feared the Nez Perce were headed to join Sitting Bull in Canada. Kelly was at Chief Joseph’s surrender north of the Bear Paw Mountains near present-day Chinook. By 1880, Montana and the Dakotas were no longer a great, lonely wilderness. Kelly, now 31, thought it was time to head for other challenges in Colorado. His later adventures took him to Alaska and the Philippines, where he was back in the Army — this time as a captain. After the Spanish-American War, he served as administrator on one of the islands. Kelly, a friend of Theodore Roosevelt, became part of the president’s “tennis cabinet.” The old scout spent his final years in California, but in his will, he specified where he wanted to be buried. “I feel my body will rest better in Montana, the scene of my early activities, than it would in the vastness of Arlington,” he wrote. He wasn’t specific about the site and left that decision to the state Historical Society. When he died on Dec. 17, 1928, his remains were kept in a mausoleum until June of 1929, when he was buried with much pomp and circumstance in ceremonies arranged by the Chamber’s precursor, the Commercial Club, and the Rotary Club. Surrounding him were veterans of all the wars he had fought in and those he had hoped to play a part in — the Civil War, the Indian Wars, the Spanish-American War and World War I. Montana Gov. J.E. Erickson attended to pay his last respects, as did David Hilger, secretary for the state Historical Society. “The story of his life reveals the fact that his most heroic services were performed alone and single-handed in what was then a great wilderness,” Hilger orated. “Probably there is no spot on the banks of the Yellowstone more superbly fitted by nature as a monumental burial place for a gallant hero of the frontier than where we now stand.” Read more: http://billingsgazette.com/news/local/yellowstone-kelly-spent-his-youth-exploring-montana/article_22dc5f0f-c823-5a22-a965-7120005109eb.html#ixzz2p4U2kd9J {{DEFAULTSORT:Kelly, Luther}} [[Category:1849 births]] [[Category:1928 deaths]] [[Category:American military personnel]] [[Category:United States Army Indian Scouts]]
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