ere projected looking toward the removal of
the tribesmen from the highways of continental travel. The result was
misgiving and increased unrest among the Indians.

In midsummer of 1868 forays occurred at many points along the border of
the Indian Territory. General Sheridan, who now commanded the Department
of the Missouri, believed that a general war was imminent. He determined
to teach the southern tribesmen a lesson they would not forget. In the
dead of winter our troops marched against the Cheyennes, then in their
encampments below the Kansas line. The Indians did not believe that
white men could march in weather forty below zero, during which they
themselves sat in their tepees around their fires; but our cavalrymen
did march in such weather, and under conditions such as our cavalry
perhaps could not endure today. Among these troops was the Seventh
Cavalry, Custer's Regiment, formed after the Civil War, and it was led
by Lieutenant-Colonel George A. Custer himself, that gallant officer
whose name was to go into further and more melancholy history of the
Plains.

Custer marched until he got in touch with the trails of the Cheyennes,
whom he knew to belong to Black Kettle's band. He did not at the time
know that below them, in the same valley of the Washita, were also the
winter encampments of the Kiowas, the Comanches, the Arapahoes, and even
a few Apaches. He attacked at dawn of a bleak winter morning, November
27, 1868, after taking the precaution of surrounding the camp, and
killed Black Kettle, and another chief, Little Rock, and over a hundred
of their warriors. Many women and children also were killed in this
attack. The result was one which sank deep into the Indian mind. They
began to respect the men who could outmarch them and outlive them on
the range. Surely, they thought, these were not the same men who had
abandoned Forts Phil Kearney, C. F. Smith, and Reno. There had been
some mistake about this matter. The Indians began to think it over. The
result was a pacifying of all the country south of the Platte. The lower
Indians began to come in and give themselves up to the reservation life.

One of the hardest of pitched battles ever fought with an Indian tribe
occurred in September, 1868, on the Arickaree or South Fork of the
Republican River, where General "Sandy" Forsyth, and his scouts, for
nine days fought over six hundred Cheyennes and Arapahoes. These savages
had been committing atrocities upon th