Marathon Pundit: In Niles, Illinois: Gravestone of the last surviving veteran of the Indian Wars

Frederick Fraske gravestone, St. Adalbert Cemetery

And the old men answer to the call
But year after year their numbers get fewer
Some day no one will march there at all.
"And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda" Eric Fogle, 1971.

Fogle wrote about Australian World War I veterans in his classic song. Earlier this week the last combat veteran from the Great War, Claude Choules, died in Australia at the age of 110.

Two years after Fogle composed "Matilda," 101 year-old Frederick (Fredrak) Fraske, the last surviving veteran of the Indian Wars, passed away. He's buried next to his wife, Lillian, on the western edge of St. Adalbert Cemetery in Niles, Illinois, which I visited this afternoon.

Fraske, an ethnic German, was born in 1872 in Posen (Poznań), Poland, which was then part of the German Empire. His family emigrated to Chicago in 1877. He joined the Army in 1894, serving as a medic and a mail carrier at Fort D. A. Russell near Cheyenne, Wyoming, anticipating an Indian attack that never came.

Of the Native Americans and potential conflict with them, Fraske later said, "We were all prepared for it. The Indians weren't bad eggs, not more than anyone else, but they've been abused. We had no serious trouble with them." He was discharged from the Army in 1897.

Fraske later worked as a painter and then as a security guard, he retired when he was 88.

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