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Show MAY SOON BE MAJOR-GENERAL I Brig. Gen. Frederick Funston, commander com-mander of the Department of California, Califor-nia, who at any time may be promoted to major general, is one of the "nght-lngest" "nght-lngest" little men in Uncle Sam's army, and a general who was not turned out in the polishing mill at West Point. He jumped into the fighting fight-ing game from the seemingly Innocuous Innocu-ous calling of a government botanical explorer and made good. Fred Funston, the captor of Aguinal-do Aguinal-do and the conqueror of the Philippines, Philip-pines, comes of a fighting family, being be-ing the son of Edward Hogue Funston, a captain in the Union army during the Civil -war, and Ann Elizabeth Mitchell Funston, a descendant of Daniel Boone. The elder Funston served three terms in congress, was for many years a Kansas legislator and speaker of the house. The son of this hardy Kansan left his father's farm in his teens ac;; went to Mexico. There ho Dicked un Snan- f - ' ' ' 'jfc - ' -'J2 Ish and sufficient American dollars to come back home and enter the Kansas State university in his early twenties. He alternated for several years be- ' tween the cloistered halls of learning and the great outdoors, earning outdoors the wherewithal to keep him at his books indoors. First he was a train collector for the Santa Fe, then he tried his hand at reporting for Kansas City newspapers and later he became a government botanical explorer in the Dakotas and in Montana, in the terrible Death Valley Val-ley of southern California, in the Alaskan wilderness, and wherever the government gov-ernment thought fit to send him in quest of rare and unique scientific data. |