The Hide Hunting Exploits of HARRY “SAM” YOUNG

It’s difficult now to remember exactly where I first read or heard about Hard Knocks by Harry “Sam” Young. The book is an extremely entertaining read and in the Publisher’s Note, it specifically states, “The great lesson of this book is that “truth is stranger than fiction.”

- Leo J. Remiger

Harry Young was born in Cape Vincent, New York, in 1849. In 1863, he ran away from home and made his first stop to visit his brother Bill, who was working as a machinist in Fulton, New York. Bill loaned him the fare to travel to New York City. After working as a bellboy in the Weldon Hotel, he relocated to New Orleans, worked his passage to Memphis on the old steamer “Bismark” and from there made his way to Fort Smith, Arkansas. From Fort Smith, he traveled to Fort Gibson. While at a stage station in the vicinity of Fort Gibson, Young hired on with a surveying party, which was engaged in running a railroad survey from Fort Smith, Arkansas, to the mainline of the Atlantic & Pacific Railway at Antelope Hills, 300 miles south. While attempting to survey across some Indian land, their survey was halted at Prairie City, the current terminus of the Atlantic & Pacific Railroad. The men were paid off and the survey party disbanded.

Young and a man named Frank Emmons walked from Fort Gibson to Chetopa, Kansas, and found employment with Bill Henderson, cutting and pitching hay. After difficulties with the boss, Young quit this job and returned to Chetopa where he hired on as a herder for an outfit owned by a man named Pancake. A month later, Young hired on with a man named Hamilton who had purchased 200 head of stock cattle out of the herd owned by Pancake. Together with a Mr. and Mrs. Sutherland, they drove the cattle to Hamilton’s ranch near Arkansas City. After being paid off, they went south into what is known as the “Cherokee Strip.” “The Strip” was a piece of land owned by the Cherokee Indians, and was about 100 miles square. It adjoined Howard County, Kansas, five miles south of the town of Elgin.