Harry Young
Harry Young, age 14, left his home town in New York with $2.50. It was 1863, he’d been reading dime novels about the Wild West and decided to see it for himself. In 1877 he arrived in San Francisco with 20 cents to his name. The years in between are the subject of his 1915 memoir, the aptly-named “Hard Knocks”. He spent most of his time in the neighborhood of Fort Laramie and Cheyenne and, later, in Deadwood. He knew Calamity Jane, Wild Bill Hickock, and a number of other famous characters. He was one of life’s extras, working odd jobs but spending much of his time as a teamster and bartender. In the later capacity he served Wild Bill his last drink.
Young’s book is a fascinating and only slightly exaggerated (according to the modern introduction by James D. McLaird) account from the kind of person who doesn’t usually show up in the history books and who rarely writes memoirs.
The story of Young’s hard-living years is similar in some respects – especially with regards to his relationship with Wild Bill – to the fictional life of Jack Crabb in Thomas Berger’s “Little Big Man”. Berger must have read Young’s book an incorporated some of his life into Crabb’s.