AT 103 HE BEGS A BED
AT A POLICE STATION.
Man Who Can Recall the War of
1812 Gets Shelter for Night
at Police Station No. 4.
A man so old that he can remember the war with Mexico as well as though it occurred yesterday, and dimly recall the war of 1812, wandered into No. 4 police station and gave himself up as a vagrant yesterday afternoon. He was James Forbes Foster, who lives at a rooming house at Eighteenth street and Minnesota avenue, Kansas City, Kas.
According to Foster, his age is 103 years, for he says he was born on Seneca street, Buffalo, N. Y., in 1806. He says further that his grandmother was Mercy Hutchins, a great tribal medicine woman of the Seneca Indians, and that he retains in his memory most of her medicinal traditions.
In personal appearance Foster is erect as a pine tree. His eyes, set in a very wrinkled face, are large and bright, his cheek bones high and his nose a thin, long beak. The lower part of his face is hid in a thicket of wiry whiskers a foot long, and his hair, as white as wool, covered his shoulders.
He tottered up to the sergeant's desk at the station and humbly asked if he might be allowed to sleep over night on the stone floor of a cell.
"I am awfully old," he began, "but I can still sleep anywhere. I am strong, but I am very tired. Give me the hardest piece of flooring you have got and an old coat to throw over me."
"How old are you?" he was asked.
For answer Foster produced a letter from an inside coat pocket bearing a stamp of a generation or two gone and shoved it under the lattice. "I guess from that I am about 20," he said. The letter follows:
Your Excellence: James Foster, who I know well, is a good scout for your armies, having lived among my people over 40 years. He has been West as far as the Mississippi river and so far North as the lakes in all parts. If you want a good scout, take him.
From RED JACKET.
Chief of Seneca Indians.
To President John Knox Polk, Washington, D. C.
The letter was yellow with age, and the envelope worn through in many places, although the old man had it wrapped in oilcloth. He admitted it was a copy m made from the original by the chief.
"Great Scott!" cried Captain Thomas Flahive, after he had glanced at it, "how old are you supposed to be, anyway?"
"Red Jacket, who was the only father I have ever known, told me I was born the last year of the Seneca famine, which was in 1806," was the reply.
"Did you fight in the Mexican war, as a scout?"
"No, I did not go. I knew too much about medicine, and Red Jacket concluded to keep me at home with him. As I remember, President Polk made no reply to the letter.
"In 1861 I was appointed as a spy to serve the government under President Lincoln. See that hand? President Lincoln, the greatest statesman the world ever produced, grasped it once."
In his conversation which somewhat wandered, Foster mentioned some great names in a familiar manner. He said he had dined once with General Winfield Scott, had known General Grant and Elihu Root. Lincoln he spoke of as a friend. He said he tendered his commission to the war department the day after the great emancipator was shot.
The old man speaks German, French and a strange tongue, which he said was the Seneca language. He recites Latin with the rapidity of a co-ed in her last college year and speaks intelligently of botany, chemistry and physics.
"I was educated at Notre Dame college in Montreal," he explained when asked where he accumulated all of his book knowledge. "The intentions of Red Jacket were to make a Catholic priest of me."
He was given a blanket and slept on the concrete floor of his cell much better than a younger man would have done.
