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Tom Averill Vernon: he vowed to
avenge the massacre of his parents.

ANY A YOUNG TV viewer tod.ay concocts a gruesome
Mday dream as he wonders how much hardship he could
have endured if he had lived in the days of the Indian frontier
battles. But no such daydream has ever equaled the true ex-
perience of Buffalo Tom.
This was the boy who was exposed to murder by supposedly
civilized white men and miraculously saved by supposedly sav-
age Sioux Indians in the Dakotas. Tom Averill grew up to be-
come famous as Tom Vernon, the buffalo rider in the Wild
West Shows which were staged throughout the world by
Buffalo Bill Cody.
Knowing that his life story was too fabulous to be easily be-
lieved, Tom went to considerable trouble to document his
claims regarding his birth and the death of his parents.
It was Tom's aim in life to vindicate his mother and father
from the false and scandalous reports which the cattle barons
spread in their campaign to sweep the plains of homesteaders
so as to keep an open range.
And Tom succeeded in correcting the record. He even left
10 GOLDEN WEST