Journalist Elmo Scott Watson quoted his interview with Ken Maynard in the 1920s:

"During the winter of 1876 I was working for a Grimes outfit which had started north with a trail herd from Matagorda Bay, Texas....We were wintering on the Salt Fork of the Arkansas river on the border of Kansas and Indian Territory, waiting for the spring market to open up in Wichita.

"One of the favorite songs of the cowboys in those days was called 'The Dying Girl's Lament,' the story of a girl who had been betrayed by her lover and who lay dying in a hospital. I don’t remember all of the song, but it began something like this:

          "'As I walked down by St. James Hospital,
          St. James Hospital so early one day, etc., etc.


"I had often amused myself by trying to write verses, and one dull winter day in camp to while away the time I began writing a poem which could be sung to the tune of 'The Dying Girl's Lament.' I made it a dying ranger or a cowboy....

"After I had finished the new words to the song I sang it to the boys in the outfit. They liked it and began singing it. It became popular with boys in other outfits ...and from that time on I heard it sung everywhere on the range and the trail."