Charles Jesse "Buffalo" Jones, born January 31, 1844, in Illinois, became fascinated with capturing wild animals as a youth and came to Kansas in 1866, where he developed into a skilled plainsman who supported his wife, two sons, and two daughters by hunting buffalo and capturing wild horses. Immortalized by Zane Grey in The Last of the Plainsmen and listed in the National Archives as one of the preservers of the American bison, Jones helped found Garden City on April 8, 1879, with John Stevens, W.D. Fulton, and James R. Fulton, each homesteading 160 acres. He persuaded the Santa Fe Railroad to stop there, was elected the town’s first mayor, became the area’s first representative in the Kansas Legislature, promoted Garden City as county seat, donated land for the courthouse, built the first courthouse there, and erected several local buildings while helping develop a 100-mile irrigation ditch from the Arkansas River through Kearny and Finney counties that irrigated some 75,000 acres. Fearing the extinction of the buffalo, he made repeated trips into the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, captured 57 buffalo calves, and returned them to his ranch near Garden City, where the offspring of this herd spread throughout the world. In 1893 he made the run for land into the Oklahoma Cherokee Strip with two horses, in 1897-98 he journeyed to the Arctic Circle and captured five baby musk oxen that were then slaughtered by superstitious Indians, and in 1901 Theodore Roosevelt appointed him the first game warden of Yellowstone National Park. In 1906 he developed a ranch and game preserve on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, where he continued his cattalo experiments, and his adventures there and in Africa drew wide attention through books by Zane Grey and Guy H. Scull. On a 1909 safari to Africa he lassoed, captured, and photographed many wild animals, then returned on a lecture tour, and in 1914 he went back to Africa, lassoed but failed to capture a gorilla, contracted malaria, and never fully recovered. Known to his peers as Colonel Jones and awarded a medal by Edward VII, King of England, for his work with animals, he died in Topeka on October 1, 1919, and was buried in Valley View Cemetery beside his wife, Martha Walton Jones, and their two sons.