Old West: Captured as a Boy by Comanches, Arizona Bill Died in San Antonio

This is Arizona Bill on his donkey “Tipperary,” shortly before he died in 1940 at the age of 94.

Bill, whose real name was Raymond Hatfield Gardner, spent the last six years of his life at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, sleeping in the stables next to his beloved donkey. His life is like something out of a movie.

He was born in Louisiana but was captured by Comanches as a boy in Texas. Somehow he either escaped or was freed.

He was a scout for General U.S. Grant during the Civil War as well as a scout for General George Armstrong Custer.

He also performed in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show for a while.

When he died at Fort Sam Houston in 1940, he was buried in an unmarked grave because the Army could not locate his records.

Because of the efforts of one man, a veteran named George Miller who had met Bill at San Antonio in the 1930s, the VA finally located the old scout’s records in dusty archives and, on Veteran’s Day, 1976, Bill was reburied with full military honors in the Sam Houston National Cemetery in San Antonio.

As Bill neared the end of his life, his greatest concern was what would happen to Tipperary after he passed on.

Military restrictions mandated that Tipperary be removed from Sam Houston, but Bill secured a place for him with donkeys in Brackenridge Park.

“But he is considered an aristocratic donkey, and it costs 10 cents to ride him, while it costs only 5 cents to ride the others,” wrote Thomas J. Jenkins in a “Frontier Times” article.

When Bill passed through Burnet, Texas, in 1929, the “Burnet Bulletin” newspaper described him as “perhaps the last noted Indian Scout of the old west” and reported that Bill, then 83 years old, camped in the city with Tipperary in order to deliver a lecture to the Boy Scouts.

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