Tumultuous Excitement

J. W. Ransom, Returning from Buffalo, Tells about Shooting of the President.

     An interesting visitor to the city just now is J. W. Ransom, of Globe, Ariz., who is stopping off here on his way home from the Buffalo exposition. Mr. Ransom was in the Temple of Music at the exposition grounds last Friday when President McKinley, was shot, and had shaken hands with the president but a few minutes before the shooting occurred, but did not, as was stated by an evening paper, witness the assassination. He was quite close to the president, however, at the time, and gives a vivid description of the tumultuous scenes the assault precipitated in the great building, where men, women and children were thrown into the wildest excitement for a time. Mr. Ransom says it is impossible to describe the scene that followed the shooting of the president, and that within thirty minutes after the occurrence everything was closed in the exposition. That night, he says, the exposition grounds, which before had been lighted with brilliance and magnificence never seen before, were dark and silent, and that throughout the city thousands of people were surging this way and that in search of news of the fate that had overtaken the nation’s president, and praying for his recovery.
     Mr. Ransom says that while not the equal of the world’s fair at Chicago in many ways, the Buffalo fair is a finished success, and in some respects surpasses the Columbian exposition, notably in the electrical display, which he declares a marvel of magnificence. He deprecates the fact that neither this state, New Mexico nor Arizona is at all adequately represented at the exposition. The Mexican government, he says, has advertised to the world in a manner unapproached by any other the wonderful resources of the southern republic, and deserves great credit for what it has accomplished in this way. The exhibits from the South American republics, he says, are also a credit to those countries. They have, for the most part, [fine?] buildings, and seem to have spared no pains in displaying their achievements to advantage. Mr. Ransom says he will not fail to visit the exposition at St. Louis in 1903. He finds much to interest him in world’s fairs and has decided that he can not afford to miss one of them. He is a pioneer resident of Globe, Ariz [sic], having gone there twenty-two years ago, when the country about that place was nothing but a wilderness, and stayed with it until it has grown to a rich mineral and grazing section, hardly second to any in the southwest. He has seen Globe grow from practically nothing to a town of 3,500 population, and is content to remain there the rest of his days.—El Paso Times.