of Pueblo, Colorado. It was christened Booneville, and the colonel moved
there. In the fall of 1862, fifty influential Indians of the various
tribes visited Colonel Boone at his new home, and begged that he would
come back to them and be their agent. He told the chiefs that the
President of the United States would not let him. Then they offered to
sell their horses to raise money for him to go to Washington to tell
the Great Father what their agent was doing; and to have him removed, or
there was going to be trouble. The Indians told Colonel Boone that
many of their warriors would be on the plains that fall, and they were
declaring they had as much right to take something to eat from the
trains as their agent had to steal goods from them.

Early in the winter of the next year, a small caravan of eight or ten
wagons travelling to the Missouri River was overhauled at Nine Mile
Ridge, about fifty miles west of Fort Dodge, by a band of Indians, who
asked for something to eat. The teamsters, thinking them to be hostile,
believed it would be a good thing to kill one of them anyhow; so they
shot an inoffensive warrior, after which the train moved on to its camp
and the trouble began. Every man in the whole outfit, with the exception
of one teamster, who luckily got to the Arkansas River and hid, was
murdered, the animals all carried away, and the wagons and contents
destroyed by fire.

This foolish act by the master of the caravan was the cause of a long
war, causing hundreds of atrocious murders and the destruction of a
great deal of property along the whole Western frontier.

That fall, 1863, Mr. Ryus was the messenger or conductor in charge of
the coach running from Kansas City to Santa Fe. He said:

It then required a month to make the round trip, about
eighteen hundred miles. On account of the Indian war
we had to have an escort of soldiers to go through the most
dangerous portions of the Trail; and the caravans all
joined forces for mutual safety, besides having an escort.

My coach was attacked several times during that season, and
we had many close calls for our scalps. Sometimes the
Indians would follow us for miles, and we had to halt and
fight them; but as for myself, I had no desire to kill one
of the miserable, outraged creatures, who had been swindled
out of their just rights.

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