I Watched Him Ride Out of Sight
- Matthew Kerns
- 12 minutes ago
- 5 min read
On October 30, 1912, the Jacksonville Journal ran a small human-interest piece tied to a large piece of news: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West had broken up for the season. As it often did, the great traveling show was dispersing for the winter, its performers and employees scattering across the country by rail and steamship.
For Frank M. Ironmonger, Florida passenger agent for the Clyde Line, the news stirred memories that reached back nearly half a century—past the Wild West, past the frontier, and all the way back to Appomattox.
Ironmonger told the paper that he had known Buffalo Bill's friend John B. Omohundro—Texas Jack—before the war, when both were boys in Fluvanna County, Virginia. Ironmonger was only 12 years old when the war ended, so that claim might sound improbable if not for one extraordinary fact: Ironmonger had been there at the end of the Civil War because he had already been a soldier for months.
Born in Portsmouth, Virginia, in 1853, Ironmonger was just eleven years old when he joined the Sixteenth Virginia Infantry in November 1864. His family had fled wartime Portsmouth for Fluvanna County in the early days of the war, where the boy enlisted and was assigned to quartermaster and courier duties with Weisiger’s Brigade, Mahone’s Division, A. P. Hill’s Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia. It was not ceremonial service. Ironmonger was frequently under fire, carried messages during active fighting, and for a time even acted as a courier for General William Mahone himself.
Ironmonger witnessed the fighting around Petersburg, endured the final retreat westward, and was present at Sailor’s Creek. When the Army of Northern Virginia finally surrendered, he was there at Appomattox Court House—one of the youngest enlisted soldiers in Confederate service. When he was paroled on April 10, 1865, he was twelve years, one month, and six days old.
In later life, Ironmonger would be widely remembered—and officially recognized—as the youngest Confederate veteran. But in April 1865, he was simply a boy riding home from defeat.
Ironmonger recalled being present when General Robert E. Lee surrendered, and even claimed that he managed to persuade Lee to sign a small card, which he carried home to his mother as a keepsake of the moment. Whether remembered with perfect precision or softened by time, the detail speaks to something undeniable: Ironmonger was close enough to history to reach out and touch it.
It was after Appomattox, Ironmonger said, that he and John B. Omohundro rode back together toward Palmyra. The war was over, but Jack was already looking west. According to Ironmonger, Omohundro told him plainly that he intended to go to Texas and become a cowboy—and invited Frank to go with him.
Ironmonger said yes.
For a brief moment, the road ahead was shared. Two young Virginians, both shaped by war far too early, riding through a ruined countryside toward uncertain futures. One saw the frontier as escape and reinvention. The other still had ties pulling him home.
Ironmonger returned to tell his mother of his plans. She had only just seen her young son survive the war—had only just welcomed him back from a conflict that had already demanded far too much from a child. The idea of him disappearing into the frontier so soon after Appomattox weighed heavily on her.
“I promised her I would not go,” Ironmonger recalled.
The next day, he rode to tell Omohundro he could not join him. Jack, he said, understood. And then came the image that stayed with Ironmonger for the rest of his life.
“I watched him until he rode out of sight,” he told the Journal. “To become a great Indian fighter, a friend of Buffalo Bill, and a man who was to have a famous and exciting experience in the Far West.”
Ironmonger stayed. He rebuilt a life in the long shadow of the war—working railroads, pursuing education, and eventually entering the steamship business. He married, raised children, and became a respected figure in Jacksonville, Florida. Texas Jack rode on—to the plains, to the stage, and into history.
But Ironmonger added something else that deserves careful attention. He said that in later years he renewed acquaintances with Texas Jack on many occasions, and that they spoke more than once about that moment after Appomattox—about watching Jack ride away.
And it was here that Ironmonger recalled Jack describing that choice in unexpectedly harsh terms. Jack, he said, had once referred to himself as riding off “to be a failure and a black sheep.”
It is a startling phrase, and an honest one.
From the vantage point of history, it is easy to forget how uncertain Texas Jack’s life actually was. His early success on the stage with Buffalo Bill came quickly, but it proved fragile. His venture at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition went literally up in smoke, destroying much of the fortune he had made in those first dramatic seasons and forcing him to start over yet again. He returned west not as a triumphant celebrity, but as a man trying to recover his footing.
More importantly, Jack died young. At thirty-three, he simply did not live long enough to see what his life would mean.
Texas Jack Omohundro never saw the Wild West show.
He never saw Buffalo Bill take the dramatic form they had built together, move it outdoors, and transform it into a spectacle that would circle the globe. He never saw the cowboy—his cowboy—enshrined as the archetypal American hero. He never knew that the skills he brought to the stage, the authenticity he insisted upon, and the life he had lived on the plains would become the foundation of America’s most enduring frontier mythology.
After Jack’s death, Buffalo Bill made certain his friend was not forgotten. Cody included Jack’s writings—his accounts of buffalo hunting with the Pawnee and his life as a working cowboy—in Wild West show programs year after year. He spoke of Jack often. Through Cody’s show, the cowboy ceased to be merely a laborer of the plains and became a national symbol.
Texas Jack never knew that was coming.
So when Ironmonger remembered Jack speaking of himself as a “failure” or a “black sheep,” it should not be read as self-pity. It was the honest assessment of a man who had stepped away from home, tradition, and security without any guarantee that history would care or any reason to believe he would be remembered.
That is what makes Ironmonger’s memory so powerful. This boy soldier who stayed behind lived long enough to see the full arc. He watched Texas Jack ride away at Appomattox, believing he was choosing uncertainty. Decades later, he watched the world absorb and celebrate the consequences of that choice.
Texas Jack Omohundro rode west never knowing that he would help define America’s idea of itself.
Frank Ironmonger rode home—and lived long enough to understand what that ride had meant.
History rarely grants its pioneers the courtesy of perspective. It is left to witnesses like Ironmonger—those who stood close at the beginning and survived to the end—to tell us what it looked like before anyone knew the story mattered.
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