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.