According to Lewis Allen Brown's 1909 biographical sketch of Smith,
- Langdon Smith was born in Kentucky Jan. 4, 1858 ... In boyhood he served in the Comanche and Apache wars as a trooper, his letters descriptive of these campaigns winning him his first newspaper position. Later he acted as a war correspondent during the extended fighting with the Sioux tribes.
Gardner, who consulted Who's Who In America 1906-7 adds that Smith went to school in Louisville, KY 1864-1872.
On February 12 1894 Smith married Marie Antionette Wright, described as "a Louisville girl" and soon after went to Cuba, reporting for the New York Herald
on the guerilla operations of Antonio Maceo Grajales
.
When you were a tadpole and I was a fish In the Paleozoic|Paleozoic time,And side by side on the ebbing tide We sprawled through the ooze and slime,Or skittered with many a caudal flip Through the depths of the Cambrian|Cambrian Fen|fen,My heart was rife with the joy of life, For I loved you even then.
Mindless we lived and mindless we loved And mindless at last we died;And deep in the rift of the Caer Caradoc Hill|Caradoc drift We slumbered side by side.The world turned on in the lathe of time, The hot lands heaved amain,Till we caught our breath from the womb of death And crept into light again.
Croaking and blind, with our three-clawed feetWriting a language dumb, With never a spark in the empty darkTo hint at a life to come.
Yet happy we lived and happy we loved,And happy we died once more;Our forms were rolled in the clinging moldOf a Neocomian|Neocomian shore. The eons came and the eons fled And the sleep that wrapped us fastWas riven away in a newer day And the night of death was past.
File:Lascaux-aurochs.jpg|144px|thumb|right| I was thewed like an Auroch bull and tusked like the great cave bear;And you, my sweet, from head to feet were gowned in your glorious hair.
And, oh! what beautiful years were these When our hearts clung each to each;When life was filled and our senses thrilled In the first faint dawn of speech.
Thus life by life and love by love We passed through the cycles strange,And breath by breath and death by death We followed the chain of change. Till there came a time in the law of life When o’er the nursing sod, The shadows broke and soul awoke In a strange, dim dream of God.
File:Wooly Mammoth-RBC.jpg|144px|thumb|right|Then I hid me close to the reedy tarn, where the mammoth came to drink; Through brawn and bone I drave the stone and slew him upon the brink.
I was thewed like an Aurochs|Auroch bull And tusked like the great cave bear;And you, my sweet, from head to feet Were gowned in your glorious hair.
I flaked a flint to a cutting edge And shaped it with brutish craft;I broke a shank from the woodland lank And fitted it, head and haft.
Then I hid me close to the reedy tarn,Where the mammoth came to drink;Through brawn and bone I drave the stone And slew him upon the brink.
Loud I howled through the moonlit wastes, Loud answered our kith and kin;From west and east to the crimson feast The clan came tramping in.