The enlisted men of the frontier Army were riding
and shooting men, able to live as the Indians did and able to beat them
at their own game. They were led by Army officers whose type has never
been improved upon in any later stage of our Army itself, or of any army
in the world.

There are certain great battles which may at least receive notice,
although it would be impossible to mention more than a few of the
encounters of the great Indian wars on the buffalo-range at about the
time of the buffalo's disappearance. The Fetterman Massacre in 1866,
near Fort Phil Kearney, a post located at the edge of the Big Horn
Mountains, was a blow which the Army never has forgotten. "In a place
of fifty feet square lay the bodies of Colonel Fetterman, Captain Brown,
and sixty-five enlisted men. Each man was stripped naked and hacked and
scalped, the skulls beaten in with war clubs and the bodies gashed with
knives almost beyond recognition, with other ghastly mutilations that
the civilized pen hesitates to record."

This tragedy brought the Indian problem before the country as never
before. The hand of the Western rancher and trader was implacably
against the tribesmen of the plains; the city-dweller of the East,
with hazy notions of the Indian character, was disposed to urge lenient
methods upon those responsible for governmental policy. While the Sioux
and Cheyenne wars dragged on, Congress created, by act of July 20, 1867,
a peace commission of four civilians and three army officers to deal
with the hostile tribes. For more than a year, with scant sympathy from
the military members, this commission endeavored to remove the causes of
friction by amicable conference with the Indian chiefs. The attitude of
the Army is reflected in a letter of General Sherman to his brother.
"We have now selected and provided reservations for all, off the great
roads. All who cling to their old hunting-grounds are hostile and will
remain so till killed off. We will have a sort of predatory war for
years--every now and then be shocked by the indiscriminate murder of
travelers and settlers, but the country is so large, and the advantage
of the Indians so great, that we cannot make a single war and end it.
From the nature of things we must take chances and clean out Indians as
we encounter them."

Segregation of the Indian tribes upon reservations seemed to the
commission the only solution of the vexing problem. Various treaties
were made and others w