The Morning Astorian

A VETERAN OFFICER

VISITS ASTORIA

MAJOR FRAZIER A. BOUTELLE, OF

VANCOUVER, SPENDS THE DAY

HERE—SOME

INCIDENTS

OF

HIS CAREER

IN

THE

ARMY

Yesterday noon there arrived in the city, via the noon express from Vancouver, Wash., a gentleman garbed in the fatigue uniform of a major in the United States army; one whose soldierly appearance and habit was determinable on sight by anyone at all familiar with the sign and carriage of the profession, and especially of the veteran group of the service. This man was old so far as the gray of his hair and the rugged lines of his stern face counted for age, but the erect form, the swift, firm and sure tread, spoke indisputably of the reserve strength inseparable from discipline and the rigors of a regular life. So notable were the characteristics that a reporter of the Astorian was prompted to pursue his deduction to a conviction, and to this end he sought the stranger out at the Hotel Occident, and found that he was Major Frazier A. Boutelle, a retired officer of the United States army, here, en route to the "Breakers" at Long Beach, where he is under summons before the joint commission of the States of Oregon and Washington to give such testimony as he may, in the matter of the boundary dispute now in course of adjustment.

Major Boutelle has been on the coast and in the great west for nearly half a century and has a war record that is unique for its incidents and associations. Like all soldiers with anything to tell it is a difficult matter to induce him to reveal anything, but the reporter was fairly successful yesterday, when after a skilful line of inquiry it developed that the major was one of the two men to fire the shots that opened the famous and bitter Modoc war, the memory of which will never fade from the history of the upper coast country at least.

He was a first lieutenant in those days, and was doing a bit of scouting with a party of men in his command, when he ran upon the savages headed by the notorious Indian leader, Scar-Face Charlie. The major drew his Colt's revolver simultaneously with the same action on the part of the Indian, and the two shots crossed in mid-air, Scar-Face Charlie's catching the major on the left arm (his weapon arm, by the way), and tearing through two thicknesses of his clothing, but failing to reach the skin, and the major's shot ripping to rags the red handkerchief that bound the savage's head. He relates the fact, with quiet enjoyment, that when Charlie was made a prisoner later on, the encounter was discussed between them, and Scar-Face admitted that he did not know just who fired first, but that both were good, and bad, marksmen, as neither had done the damage they were seeking to do, though both had hit what they shot at.

Across the left cheek-bone Major Boutelle carries a livid scar, and nothing the reporter's interest in that particular sign of his war-days, he told the following amusing story:

"I was once associated with a regiment that had three other war-scarred veterans on its staff, and the four of us were generally spotted at once as the grim and grisly men who had been through the roughest dangers of our professional quest and had issued from the fray with all the appropriate and convincing signs of duty nobly done; when the truth of the matter was, one of the officers, whose first and little fingers had been shot off, had lost them by a self-inflicted wound from a shot-gun in his boyhood's days; another, whose right thumb and fore finger were gone, was the victim of a corn-cutter in a frolic when he was a kid; still another who bore a great scar across the half of his face suffered from the awkward manipulation of a razor when he was new to the mysteries of shaving; and as to my own scar here, that was the mark I won from the home-stove in the kitchen. Thus, you see, scars do not always signify any surplus of courage nor the results thereof."

Major Boutelle is the man who, after the battle between the forces of Lieutenant Smith's regulars and the braves of Curly Headed Doctor, one of the Modoc chiefs, went out on the field, alone and deliberately, brought in the abandoned body of a man by the name of Crawley, a victim of the fight, and who was desperately wounded, but yet alive, and carried it into camp in the face of the ambushed fire from the Indian retreat not seventy yards away.

This gallant officer is one of the very few survivors of that famous war and is qualified to give a thousand good stories of those exciting days, if a brave man's modesty did not so inopportunely obtrude itself at every propitious moment.