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Show WhemRm&hm i i f I r j--;"" "ir-f'y V 7ijlv i if i f! fir ;2V; affiSr,rai By ELMO SCOTT WATSON. TIIIKTY years ago America linil a new national hero. He wns "a little man with a slight limp; a little man who ! ' ' weighs less than a hundred w pounds, with a Vandyke beard and a sense of humor that bubbles in him like the effervescence of wine." His name was Frederick Funston and his "madcap "mad-cap enterprise," as he himself called It, put his name on the lips of millions. mil-lions. For Funston had captured Emilio Agulnaldo, the lender of the Filipino insurrectos, the most talked-of talked-of man In the Orient, If not in the whole world at tlmt time, who for three years had been lending some 70,000 American troops and native auxiliaries a merry chase from one end of the province of Luzon to another. an-other. On March 23, 1001, the chase came to an end when, through the daring and the strategy of the little Kansan, this wily native leader was taken prisoner. Insignlficnnt though Funston may have been In appearance, few men's lives had been packed as full with adventure ad-venture as had his when he sprang Into fame almost overnight. He was born in Ohio in 1S05, the son of a first lieutenant In the Union army, who in ISO" moved to Kansas when Frederick was two years old, where he was elected elect-ed to the Kansas state legislature and later elected and repeatedly re-elected to congress. Young Funston was educated in Iola, Kan., attended the University of Kansas for two years and then went to work as a newspaper reporter, first at Fort Smith, Ark., and later on the Kansas City Journal. During the summer of 1S00 he attended at-tended a mass meeting In New York called to arouse sympathy for the Cubans who were struggling to throw off the yoke of Spain. Funston became be-came Interested in the cause of Cuban liberty and offered his services to the Cuban Junta. After drilling recruits under its direction, he joined a filibustering filibus-tering expedition and aided in delivering deliver-ing to General Gomez the first Hotch-kiss Hotch-kiss guns owned by the Cuban revolutionists. revolu-tionists. Two weeks later he was placed In charge of these guns as captain cap-tain of artillery. During his IS months In Cuba Funston Fun-ston took part In 22 engagements and so fearful was the execution wrought by his guns (five pieces, including a pneumatic dynamite gun, the first ever used in battle) that the Spaniards set a price upon his head. At the battle of Samni his lungs were pierced by a Mauser bullet and while he was recovering re-covering from this wound his hip was injured by his horse falling upon It during a cavalry charge. This was followed by an attack of fever and with his health broken Funston attempted at-tempted to reach the coast and escape to the United States. He was arrested by the Spaniards but succeeded in convincing them that he was a deserter from the Cuban army (after swallowing the passport which would have betrayed him) and although they at first sentenced him to a firing squad and a stone wall, he was finally freed and sent to the United States. This was in 1S00 and the next few years Funston spent on the lecture platform. At the outbreak of the Spanish-American war he organized the Twentieth Kansas Volunteers a regiment similar to the Bough Kiders, of which he was made n colonel. His regiment was or- dered to the Philippines and in November, No-vember, 1S08. he joined Gen. Wesley Merritt at Manila and aided In the capture of the capital. It is at this point that Aguinaldo comes into the picture. The early life and ancestry of this leader is cloaked in mystery. He is said to have much Spanish blood in his veins from which came his Intelligence, his courage, his military ability and his political acumen. When In August, 1S98, he declared himself president of the revolutionary revo-lutionary government of the Philippines Philip-pines and general in chief of its army, he called himself Don Emilio Aguinaldo Agui-naldo y Famy. He was even then dreaming of independence for his native na-tive land, after the Americans had defeated de-feated the hated Spaniard and these dreams led to the Insurrection against the new masters of the Islands. Almost from the beginning of the insurrection Funston had been in the field against Aguinaldo's followers. His strict discipline had not made bim especially popular with his soldiers, but after the affair at Murilao river in April, 1S00, he had their unbounded respect. There he found the bridge across the river . destroyed and a strong force of insurrectos on the other side to resist a crossing by the Americans. Selecting 20 of those who volunteered to accompany him, Funston Fun-ston swam the river, drove the enemy back and took 80 prisoners. A few days later, with only 45 men, he crossed the Rio Grande at Calumpit on a raft, and after a desperate fight drove 2,500 of the enemy from an Intrenched In-trenched position. For this feat he was promoted to brigadier general of volunteers. Throughout 1S99 and 1900 there was constant fighting but always the leader lead-er of the insurrectos eluded capture. Sometime during 1900 he seerued to have dropped out of sight entirely but in January, 1901, from his hiding place in the province of Isabeln.Agulnaido sent out a letter denouncing the sub-chiefs sub-chiefs who had taken the oath of allegiance al-legiance to the United States and ordered or-dered certain Insurgent forces in southern Luzon to join him at the rendezvous in Isabela. The messenger messen-ger entrusted with this letter surrendered surren-dered to an American lieutenant in February and upon securing the Information In-formation so long desired, General Funston determined upon a daring plan for capturing Aguinaldo. Going to Manila to lay his plans before his superiors, Generals MacArthur aud Wheaton, he finally gained their consent con-sent to the attempt. Taking with him Capts. II. W. Newton and Tviissel T. Hazzard, Lieuts. Oliver P. M. Haz-zard Haz-zard and Burton J. Mitchell and a company of SO Macabebes who spoke the Tagalog languages, he was landed on a beach south of Caslguran in the province of Principe on March 13, 1901. Aguinaldo's messenger aud the Mncabebe scouts were to pass themselves them-selves off as a detachment of Insurgent Insur-gent Tagalogs who had captured the five Americans and were taking them as prisoners to Aguinaldo. The position posi-tion of Funston and Ii is companions was a dangerous one. Everything depended de-pended upon the faithfulness of the Macabebe. Should they turn traitor to the Americans, it meant certain death. But they remained faithful and after a fatiguing and dangerous march of seven days and nights, the party reached a point eight miles from Palanan, Aguinaldo's hiding place. A message, stamped with the seal of General Lacuna, an Aguinaldo supporter, sup-porter, which had been found among the papers handed over by the insurgent insur-gent leader's messenger, was sent forward for-ward to Aguinaldo and a prompt response re-sponse was received, welcoming the party. The Americans and their fake Tagalogs hastened forward. Funston himself was not present at the actual capture. That he entrusted to a Spaniard, Span-iard, Iazaro Segovia, and a detachment detach-ment of the scouts. The story, as Funston told it later, follows: "Running up the bank toward the house, we were met by Segovia, who came running out, his face aglow with exultation and his clothes spattered with the blood of the men he had wounded. He called out in Spanish: 'It Is all right; we have him.' We hastened Into the house and I introduced intro-duced myself to Aguinaldo, telling him that we were officers of the American army, that the men with us were our troops, and not his, and that he was a prisoner of war. He was given assurance as-surance that he need fear no bad treatment. He said, In a dazed sort of way: 'Is this not some joke?' I assured hlin that it was not, though, as a matter of fact. It was a pretty bad one on him. While naturally agitated, agi-tated, his bearing was dignified, and in this moment of his fall there was nothing of the craven." In after years Aguinaldo was loud In his praise of Funston for the audacity au-dacity and skill of his plan, saying that only by the stratagem used could he have been captured. The news that Aguinaldo was captured w-as (lashed to the United States and was hailed with delight as the sign that the long and weary war against the insurgents was over at last. President Presi-dent McKinley on March 30 commissioned commis-sioned Funston a brigadier general in the regular army and had It not been for his untimely death in 1917 it is probable that he would have been commander in chief of the A. E. F. when the United States entered the World war. His only part in that great conflict con-flict was to give his name to a training train-ing camp in Kansas where thousands of men received their training for "over tLere." ( by Westra Newspaper Union.) |