"You couldn't even write your name, Willie," she said. "You couldn't
sign the payroll. To think my boy cannot so much as write his name!"
I thought that over all the way home, and determined it should never
happen again.
In Uncle Aleck Majors' book, "Seventy Years on the Frontier," he
relates how on every wagon-sheet and wagon-bed, on every tree and barn
door, he used to find the name "William F. Cody" in a large, uncertain
scrawl. Those were my writing lessons, and I took them daily until I
had my signature plastered pretty well over the whole of Salt Creek
Valley.
I went to school for a time after that, and at last began really to
take an interest in education. But the Pike's Peak gold rush took me
with it. I could never resist the call of the trail. With another boy
who knew as little of gold-mining as I did we hired out with a
bull-train for Denver, then called Aurora.
We each had fifty dollars when we got to the gold country, and with it
we bought an elaborate outfit. But there was no mining to be done save
by expensive machinery, and we had our labor for our pains. At last,
both of us strapped, we got work as timber cutters, which lasted only
until we found it would take us a week to fell a tree. At last we hired
out once more as bull-whackers. That job we understood, and at it we
earned enough money to take us home.
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