Hamilton Gardner on Philip St George Cooke's Fictional Friend

Historians of the American West have little use for the invented "Friend" in Scenes and Adventures in the Army. Most commentators don't know what to make of him. Usually they just ignore him.
 
To his everlasting credit, Hamilton Gardner openly confronted the problem of reading numerous and seemingly extraneous fictions as veritable history.  Here is Gardner at his candid and pragmatic best, from the October 1953 article for The Colorado Magazine, titled "Captain Philip St George Cooke and the March of the First Dragoons to the Rocky Mountains in 1845":

"Not all of the 149 pages of his account of the expedition were devoted to strictly military facts. He was an unusually well-read man, with keen powers of observation of persons, events and places. In a rather striking literary style he comments freely on the Oregon emigrants, the Indians, the daily routine of the Dragoons, their non-duty activities such as their hunting, the wild life, the flora and fauna, scenic effects, scientific conclusions, in particular, geology, and allusions to local history. But most of the space is devoted to detailing fictitious conversations with a mythical "Friend," on all manner of non-military subjects. Frequently one must wander through a maze of irrelevant material in order to find a pertinent fact concerning the march."
(Colorado Magazine p249)

Gardner it seems did not know about the earlier publication of Scenes and Adventures, Part II, as "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" in the 1851-1853 Southern Literary Messenger.  So he would not have known about the prior textual evolution of this confounded "Friend" from Imaginary Friend to Frank.