The flowers on J. B. Hickok's grave in boothill had not yet faded when Deadwood's self-styled "poet scout" whipped out his pen and began composing the first of several poems dedicated to the murdered gunfighter:

Sleep on brave heart, in peaceful slumber,
Bravest scout in all the West;
Lightning eyes and voice of thunder,
Closed and hushed in quiet rest.
Peace and rest at last is given,
May we meet again in heaven.
Rest in peace

Wild Bill wasn't the only slain hero eulogized by J. W. ("Captain Jack") Crawford. When the news reached Deadwood of Custer's death at the Little Big Horn, it inspired these lines.

Did I hear the news from Custer?
Well, I reckon I did, old pard.
It came like a streak o' lightning,
And you bet, it hit me hard.
I ain't no hand to blubber,
And the briny ain't run for years,
But chalk me down for a lubber
If I didn't shed regular tears.

Educator and author Annie Tallent called Crawford's The Death of Custer "a specimen of real Black Hills literature." High praise for for a man who was illiterate until his late teens.

Crawford immigrated to the coal mining town of Minersville, Pennsylvania from Northern Ireland at the age of 14. When his father marched away to war in 1861, young Jack helped support his family by working in the coal mines before enlisting in the Pennsylvania Regulars. Wounded twice in heavy fighting during the last days of the Civil War, he was a patient at a convalescent hospital when a Sister of Charity taught the young soldier to read and write.

Crawford joined the 1876 gold rush to the Black Hills, leaving behind his wife and children. He was a real curiosity in mining camps filled with hard-working, hard-drinking prospectors. Not only did he write poetry, he never touched a drop of whiskey.

He often related the story of his promise to his mother made two years after he returned from the war. As she was dying, worn out from struggling with family problems caused by her husband's alcohol addiction, Susie Wallace Crawford extracted a deathbed vow from her son that he would never drink liquor.

Captain Jack not only kept that promise, he gloried in it and might have been a bit of a bore with his vociferous insistence on personal sobriety. He was one of a very few teetotalers among the army scouts, and the only man on the frontier that could be entrusted to deliver an unopened bottle of whiskey, according to Buffalo Bill Cody.

Another one of Captain Jack's poems, Mother's Prayers, made a strong plea for abstinence:

Oh, my brother, do not drink it,
Think of all your mother said;
While upon her death-bed laying,
Or perhaps she is not dead;
Don't you kill her, then, I pray you,
She has got enough of cares,
Sign the pledge, and God will help you,
If you think of mother's prayers.

Apparently the rough gold miners were willing to overlook Captain Jack's temperance tendencies, for he seemed to be respected and well-liked. J. T. ("Buckskin Johnny") Spaulding, in a 1927 article written for the Queen City Mail, described meeting Crawford when he arrived in the Black Hills in 1876.

It was here that I met Capt. Jack Crawford, the poet scout. He was six feet in height, of fine build, and dressed in a nicely fitting and artistic buckskin suit, very much resembling Wild Bill. He joined us for the balance of the trip. The roads, or lack of roads, was something fierce, but Jack never hesitated, always putting his shoulder to the wheel. I killed a deer now and then and divided it up among the outfit as need arose. On coming to the gulch we unhitched the teams and with two men at the tongue, we let the wagons down from tree to tree. We camped at the mouth of Deadwood creek near the present site of the Burlington depot.

Lack of self esteem didn't seem to be a problem for Captain Jack. As a correspondent for Omaha and Cheyenne newspapers, Crawford's exaggerated reports of fortunes to be made in the Black Hills were more fairy tale than fact. He never had much luck as a miner and even the Rockerville diggings named "Captain Jack's Gulch" produced little gold.

In Custer, Crawford was elected to the town's first city council and was chief scout for the Black Hills Rangers, organized to protect miners from Indian raids.

Crawford joined General Crook's command as a military scout in the summer of 1876, after the Battle of the Little Big Horn, was with Crook at the Battle of Slim Buttes and took part in the starvation march when rations gave out and the men subsisted on horsemeat as they made their way to the Black Hills.

Later that fall, Crawford left the Hills to begin his career as an entertainer with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. The partnership with Cody ended in Virginia City, Nevada, in the summer of l877 when, in a combat scene staged on horseback, Crawford accidently shot himself in the groin and later blamed Cody's drunkeness for the mishap.

In 1880 Crawford was scouting for the army in New Mexico in the war against the Apache. He became a post trader at Fort Craig, New Mexico, established a home for his family there and engaged in ranching and mining. In 1889 he was appointed a special agent in the Justice Department, investigating illegal liquor traffic on the Indian reservations in the western states and territories.

Four years later Captain Jack embarked on a new career as a public lecturer, depicting the authentic West of his experience and attempting to overcome the influence of dime novels he blamed for leading young men astray. In all his public appearances, Crawford insisted on a realistic portrayal of the vanishing frontier, in opposition to the sensationalism of the lurid dime novelists.

Yet when he stepped on stage for Chautauqua and lyceum bureau appearances, he might well have stepped right out of the pages of one of the popular dime novels. Carrying a rifle, dressed in buckskin pants, fur-trimmed buckskin coat, a wide sombrero over shoulder-length hair, with a six-shooter strapped at his waist, Captain Jack embodied the romantic Western hero for Eastern audiences. An introduction described him as a man who lived for years "amid the wild and exciting incidents of savage border warfare, accustomed to scenes of bloodshed and violence ... dealing with the most vicious and depraved criminals ... has preserved through it all an honest manhood and a character of which he is justly proud."

One newspaper reviewer said:

From the time he opened his mouth till he shut it and sat down, amidst thunders of applause, he kept the audience in one continuous uproar ... Humor flows from Capt. Jack like water from a sprinkling cart. Sometimes it falls upon you in a gentle and enjoyable shower, and then it pours upon you like a thousand torrents.

In stage performances, Crawford depicted the Indian as dangerous, but a brave and worthy opponent. His poems about Black Hills days were contradictory, sometimes describing the Sioux as demons; sometimes showing that Indians had the same emotions and desire for justice as the whites. He exhibited liberal views for the times, with poems and short stories sanctioning interracial marriages.

In a dramatric close to his performances, he illustrated how Wild Bill Hickok defended himself from two outlaws approaching from both front and rear. After two rapid shots with his six shooter, one forward and the other over his shoulder, Crawford would exit the stage to thunderous applause.

For five years, Crawford enhanced a nationwide reputation as an entertainer until he left for the Klondike in 1898, to engage in another fruitless search for gold. He returned to the lecture circuit two years later and spent the next decade making public appearances throughout the country on the lecture circuit.

When he died in 1917 in New York, far from his beloved western frontier, one obituary tribute said he was "a real scout and a real poet --- a man with a warrior's soul and the heart of a woman."