roof-tree and to foster under it those virtues that are built into the
nation's power and honor. I had had thrust upon me in the day of my
young untried strength a heavy sense of responsibility. I had known the
crushing anguish of feeling that one I loved had fallen a prey to a
savage foe before whose mastery death is a joy. I was now to learn the
truth of all the teaching along the way. I was to see in the days of
that late winter the finest element of power the American flag can
symbolize--the value set upon the American home, over which it is a
token of protection. This, then, was that other purpose of this
campaign--the rescue of two captive women, seized and dragged away on
that afternoon when Bud and O'mie and I leaned against the south wall of
old Fort Hays in the October sunshine and talked of the hazard of Plains
warfare. But of this other purpose the privates knew nothing at all. The
Indian tribes, now full of fair promises, were allowed to take up their
abode on their reservations without further guarding. General Custer,
with the Seventh United States Regiment, and Colonel Horace L. Moore,
in full command of the Nineteenth Kansas Cavalry, were directed to reach
the Cheyenne tribe and reduce it to submission.

A thousand men followed the twenty-one buglers on their handsome horses,
in military order, down Kansas Avenue in Topeka, on that November day in
1868, when the Kansas volunteers began this campaign. Four months later,
on a day in early March, Custer's regiment with the Nineteenth, now
dismounted cavalry, filed out of Fort Sill and set their faces
resolutely to the westward. Infantry marching was new business for the
Kansas men, but they bent to their work like true soldiers. After four
days a division came, and volunteers from both regiments were chosen to
continue the movement. The remainder, for lack of marching strength, was
sent up on the Washita River to await our return in a camp established
up there under Colonel Henry Inman.

Reed, one of my Topeka comrades, was of those who could not go farther.
O'mie was not considered equal to the task. I fell into Reed's place
with Hadley and John Mac and Pete, when we started out at last to
conquer the Cheyennes, who were slipping ever away from us somewhere
beyond the horizon's rim. The days that followed, finishing up that
winter campaign, bear a record of endurance unsurpassed in the annals of
American warfare.

I have read the fascinating story of Co