nsas sand-hills, never, in all its history, less safe for
freighters than in that summer of 1867.

In this vast demesne the raiding Cheyenne, the cruel Kiowa, the
blood-thirsty Arapahoe, with bands of Dog Indians and outlaws from every
tribe, contested, foot by foot, for supremacy against the out-reaching
civilization of the dominant Anglo-American. The lonely trails were
measured off by white men's graves. The vagrant winds that bear the odor
of alfalfa, and of orchard bloom to-day, were laden often with the smoke
of burning homes, and often, too, they bore that sickening smell of
human flesh, once caught, never to be forgotten. The story of that
struggle for supremacy is a tragic drama of heroism and endurance. In it
the Eighteenth Kansas Cavalry played a stirring part.

It seems but yesterday to me now, that July day so many years ago, when
our four companies, numbering fewer than four hundred men, detrained
from the Union Pacific train at Fort Harker on the Smoky Hill. And the
faces of the men who were to lead us are clear in memory. Our commander,
Colonel Moore, always brave and able; and our captains, Henry Lindsay,
and Edgar Barker, and George Jenness, and David Payne, with the shrewd,
courageous scout, Allison Pliley, and the undaunted, clear-thinking,
young lieutenant, Frank Stahl. Ours was not to be a record of unfading
glory, as national military annals show, yet it may count mightily when
the Great Records are opened for final estimates. Those men who marched
two thousand miles, back and forth, upon the trackless plains in that
four months' campaign, have been forgotten in the debris of uneventful
years. Our long-faded trails lie buried under wide alfalfa-fields and
the paved streets of western Kansas towns. From the far springs that
quenched our burning thirst comes water, trickling through a nickel
faucet into a marble basin, now. Where the fierce sun seared our
eyeballs, in a treeless, barren waste, green groves, atune with
song-birds, cast long swaths of shade on verdant sod. The perils and the
hardships of the Eighteenth Kansas Cavalry are now but as a tale that is
told.

And yet of all the heroes whose life-trails cut my own, I account among
the greatest those men under whose command, and with whose comradeship,
I went out to serve the needs of my generation among the vanguards of
the plains. And if in a sunset hour on the west ridge beyond the little
town of Burlingame I had left a hopeless love beh