Falstaff's Battalion Was Genteel By Comparison

Thus did James Clyman describe the intrepid adventurers who answered General Ashley's advertisment in the St. Louis paper in 1823. I don't think there are beaver in Afghanistan, but the Rockies are but foothills compared to the Himalayas.

This is a helluva crew I am thrown in with. The quiet and the loud, the short and the tall, the humongous and the anorexic, the bowed out and the driven in. Sam Watkins of Company H, 1st Tenn, would say this outfit beats Forepaugh's Double Ringed Circus.

And all of us somewhat out of the ordinary. Everybody I have talked to has had somebody to tell them they were crazy as hell.

It is not a sane world over there. A certain amount of craziness is a survival tactic.