1927 wedding ended 56-year engagement         

             A simple wedding ceremony in a Wisconsin home on an October day in 1927 ended a record setting 56-year engagement for an 1876 Black Hills pioneer.

When the license clerk asked for their ages, the groom replied with a straight face, “Legal age, and we had our parents consent 55 years ago.”

He was 78; the bride was 74.

John T. Spaulding proposed to 18-year-old Nettie Dobbs while living with her family in southeastern Minnesota. After observing the young man’s remarkable skill in healing sick or injured animals, her father offered to put him through medical school, but Spaulding was too much of an outdoorsman to consider a profession that would confine him within four walls.

In 1871, after becoming engaged to Nettie, he followed Horace Greeley’s advice and headed west, assuring his sweetheart he’d send for her just as soon as he could establish a home. From that point on, the plot of the story could well have been taken directly from a Victorian novel, complete with western hero, nefarious older man and naïve young girl.

Spaulding was well equipped for life on the western plains. While growing up in Wisconsin, his closest friend and companion was a Winnebago Indian boy who taught him the Winnebago ways of hunting, trapping, animal lore and woodcraft.

Commercial harvesting of buffalo hides was paying very well, with hides selling for as much as $3 apiece. In western Nebraska, Spaulding teamed up with Texas Jack Sackett in a hide hunting partnership. The two scouts and hunters kept three skinners busy, Oscar and Silas Bird and 18-year-old Jesse Hall.

 For the next five years, as they followed the migrating buffalo herds across the plains, Spaulding faithfully wrote to Nettie every two weeks and couldn’t understand why he never received a reply.

He didn’t know Nettie was no longer living at home. She had moved to another town to help care for the children of an ailing aunt. When the aunt died the widower set up a Machiavellian scheme to prevent Nettie from leaving his home. With the connivance of his postmaster friend, Giles intercepted her incoming and outgoing mail.

            “I had sent my letters to her old address and they were forwarded to her,” Spaulding said, “but she never received them, nor did she ever receive another letter from her own folks, nor they from her. She became anxious and restless and asked to be sent home, but was put off under one pretext or another until she got a letter from her stepmother stating that I had married another, thus proving that I cared no more for her than a dog.”

            Nettie collapsed while reading the letter purportedly written by her stepmother, then insisted she be taken home. When appeals to her sympathy and love for his little children failed, Giles bluntly told the young girl she would have to marry him to save her good name.

            “You have been with me so long, with no one else but the children, it will cause talk and slander,” he said. “Be sensible and we will drive into town and get a license and be married at once.”

The confused and heartbroken young girl, convinced she’d been cast aside by a faithless lover, was manipulated into marrying the much older man. Giles promptly sold his Minnesota farm and moved the family to Texas to ensure Nettie wouldn’t learn of his duplicity.

By the winter of 1875-76 hunting buffalo hides had ceased to be profitable and rumors of gold discoveries in the Black Hills reached the buffalo hunters. Spaulding, who’d heard about Nettie’s marriage, concluded he’d been jilted without so much as a “Dear John” letter. He saw no point in returning to civilization and willingly joined the gold rush to Dakota Territory.         

Many years later Spaulding described the trip north and his arrival in the Black Hills in articles published in area newspapers. “W. C. Tomlins (Buffalo Bill of the Black Hills), Jesse Hall and myself joined forces and left the buffalo range for the Black Hills with a supply of grub to last us a year in case the gold excitement proved to be a hoax---as most everyone predicted,” he said.

We came to North Platte. “Dick” Hughes and his outfit were camped waiting for the wind to go down so they could ford the river. (He was then only a boy and it was on this trip that we formed a lifelong friendship. R. B. Hughes became one of the leading journalists of the West.)

    A big wagon train was camped on the other side and when the wind went down in the evening they came with teams and helped us across. They were from Wichita, Kansas, and had learned from pony express riders that some buffalo hunters were coming behind. None of them had ever had experience with hostile Indians and they concluded to lay over for us and give their stock a couple days rest. I was engaged to act as scout and guide for the train.

    There were 65 men with the usual percentage of “Johns” and to designate me from the others they called me “Buckskin Johnny” or just “Buckskin” as I was dressed in buckskin from my wolfskin cap to the soles of my feet and the name clung to me as long as I remained in the Black Hills. From boyhood I had killed deer and elk, tanned the skins and made my own clothing. My moccasins I made from the heaviest part of the elk hide.

           Buckskin Johnny safely guided the wagon train on into the Black Hills, thwarting an Indian ambush at Buffalo Gap, the southern passage into the Hills.

Scouting ahead of the train, he came across tracks of seven Indian ponies and advised Capt. Burns on how to safely proceed through the pass. He positioned men on the wagons, riding back to back with loaded guns across their laps, and had four armed men walk ahead of the lead team. The wagon train made it through the gap without incident.

Arriving in Custer, the newcomers heard “good reports from Deadwood, of new discoveries at Sand Creek and Nigger Hill, and the next morning we hit the trail for those places.”

 Accompanied by Capt. Jack Crawford, the poet scout, they made it to the northern hills diggings on May 14. Spaulding described their arrival in Deadwood Gulch in a 1927 edition of the Queen City Mail:

    …we arrived at Whitewood Creek by letting the wagons down over a strong rope to the rear axle, then took a run around a tree and unhitched the horses, and two strong men guided the wagon by the tongue, while I, the only raft lineman in the outfit, eased the wagon down from tree to tree. This was repeated with each wagon till all were down the hill; this landed us in the gulch near where the fairgrounds are. We pulled to the mouth of Deadwood (creek) and camped.  

Two days later, Spaulding and a couple of the men in his party killed a large silvertip bear at the upper end of the gulch, less than 50 yards from the present site of the Deadwood Masonic Temple.

          An expert rifleman, Spaulding had no interest in gold prospecting. He put his skilled marksmanship to good use in supplying meat for the gold camps. Dick Hughes claimed Spaulding “took a tremendous toll of the game animals of the Hills and of the buffalo and antelope that were numerous on the plains country to the north.” Jesse Hall said he watched Buckskin Johnny kill fifteen antelope on a single stand with fifteen shots.

                “Though he had spent years among the rough characters of the frontier, he never had adopted their vices,” Hughes said. “He used neither liquor nor tobacco in any form, and an obscene or profane word I never heard pass his lips.”

            The next few years were busy ones for Buckskin Johnny. In July 1876 he helped build the Spearfish stockade to protect settlers in the area from Indian raids. That fall he scouted for General Crook in the pursuit of Crazy Horse and his Oglala band after the Battle of the Little Bighorn. He began building a log cabin along the Redwater River east of the present town of Belle Fourche and persuaded his brother-in-law T. J. Davis to move his family to the Black Hills.

Buckskin Johnny continued to supply game to the gold camps, hunted the migrating Canadian buffalo herd in the Powder River area and raised horses in the Bear Lodge country near Devils Tower. In 1891, he and two nephews trailed his registered horses west across Yellowstone Park and the Continental Divide to a new frontier in the northwest. He subsequently lived in Oregon, Washington and California.

When the Spanish American War broke out in 1898 Buckskin Johnny tried to enlist in the U. S. Army and was initially rejected because of his age. The 49-year-old Spaulding challenged and bested the recruiting sergeant in a two-mile foot race, then signed up to serve with the California volunteers as scout, sharp shooter and aide to General Lawton.

It was during a trip back to South Dakota in 1916 that Spaulding learned how Nettie had been tricked into marrying the deceitful Giles and was told the family had moved from Texas to Montana.

The conspiracy to intercept mail from Nettie’s family involved even the Giles children and grandchildren, but eventually a letter from her younger sister slipped through.

In response, Nettie wrote, “We were greatly surprised in hearing from you after so many years; we had long since given you up. Mr. Giles is confined to his bed by an incurable disease. Please write at once and tell the rest of the family.”  

            The patience he’d developed during his years as an Indian scout came into play when Buckskin Johnny attempted to contact Nettie after her husband’s death. One of his letters finally made it past the family censors and she responded. They met at her sister’s Wisconsin home where they were married a week later.

            Sadly enough, the long-separated sweethearts celebrated just four wedding anniversaries at their honeymoon cottage near Yountville, California. Buckskin Johnny died on January 18, 1932, during surgery at the Napa Valley Veterans Hospital. Nettie survived him by just a few months.    

Editor’s note: Our thanks to Vernon Davis, Beulah, Wyoming, and Pennington County Commissioner Ken Davis for access to family records about their great-great uncle, Buckskin Johnny Spaulding.