in their ravenous hunger, tearing the clothing
from the men who came too carelessly near to their rope tethers.

That splendid group of mounts that had pranced proudly down Kansas
Avenue less than a month before, moving on now nearly seven days without
food, dying of cruel starvation, made a feature of this tragical winter
campaign that still puts an ache into my soul. Long ago I lost most of
the sentiment out of my life, but I have never seen a hungry horse since
that Winter of '68 that I let go unfed if it lay within my power to
bring it food.

The camp was well named. It was Hadley and Reed and Pete and John Mac,
that good-natured quartet, who stood sponsors for that title. We were a
pitiful lot of fellows in this garrison. We mixed the handful of flour
given to us with snow water, and, wrapping the unsalted dough around a
sagebrush spike, we cooked it in the flames, and ate it from the stick,
as a dog would gnaw a bone. The officers put a guard around the few
little hackberry trees to keep the men from eating the berries and the
bark. Not a scrap of the few buffalo we found was wasted. Even the
entrails cleansed in the snow and eaten raw gives hint of how hungry we
were.

At last in our dire extremity it was decided to choose five hundred of
the strongest men and horses to start under the command of
Lieutenant-Colonel Horace L. Moore, without food or tents, through the
snow toward the Beulah Land of Camp Supply. Pliley had been gone for
three days. We had no means of knowing whether his little company had
found Sheridan's Camp or were lost in the pathless snows of a
featureless land, and we could not hold out much longer.

I was among the company of the fittest chosen to make this journey. I
was not yet twenty-two, built broad and firm, and with all the heritage
of the strength and endurance of the Baronet blood, I had a power of
resistance and recoil from conditions that was marvellous to the
veterans in our regiment.

It was mid-forenoon of the fifth of November when the Nineteenth Kansas
moved out of Camp Crawford by the Shunganunga and marched proudly down
the main thoroughfare of Topeka at the auspicious beginning of its
campaign. Twenty days later, Lieutenant-Colonel Moore again headed a
marching column, this time, moving out of Camp Starvation on Sand
Creek--five hundred ragged, hungry men with famishing horses, bearing no
supplies, going, they could only guess whither, and unable even to
surmise how ma