20/05/2025
A man & his beloved Donkey, what a story!
So many Texas characters and so little time to write about them. This is Arizona Bill on his b***o "Tipperary," shortly before Arizona Bill died in 1940 at the age of 94. Bill, whose real name was Raymond Hatfield Gardner, spent the last six years of his life in San Antonio. His life is like something out of a movie. Among other things, he was a scout for General U.S. Grant during the Civil War as well as a scout for General Custer. He also performed in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show for awhile. When he died at Fort Sam Houston in 1940 he was buried in an unmarked grave because the Army could not locate his records. But 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. Incidentally, as Bill neared the end of his life, his greatest concern was for 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.
