The lives of Ross Hendershot and of his dearest friend, Ralph Forney, began in tough times, pre Civil War Texas, a tough place, with tough people around them everywhere. Ross and Ralph met in Yuma, Arizona for the first time when Ross completed his trek from Phoenix to Yuma across the Sonoran Desert. They both grew up not terribly far apart from each other, but never met as children or young men. Their parents were hard people who lived hard lives, Ross"s originally coming from Virginia via Kentucky, and Ralph"s via Tennessee, also originally from Virginia. In their times as boys they learned early in life how to load a musket and how to create bullets out of lead. Their parents built small ranches and dealt with native incursions every month which the settlers came to call, in northeast T
