ceived it with such an air of indifference and in such a stoical
silence that General Custer had no hope his mission had succeeded.

In 1875 General Crook was sent into the Hills to make a farcical
demonstration of the government's desire to maintain good faith, but no
one was deceived, the Indians least of all. In August Custer City was
laid out, and in two weeks its population numbered six hundred. General
Crook drove out the inhabitants, and as he marched triumphantly out of
one end of the village the people marched in again at the other.

The result of this continued bad faith was inevitable; everywhere the
Sioux rose in arms. Strange as it might seem to one who has not followed
the government's remarkable Indian policy, it had dispensed firearms
to the Indians with a generous hand. The government's Indian policy,
condensed, was to stock the red man with rifles and cartridges, and then
provide him with a first-class reason for using them against the whites.
During May, June, and July of that year the Sioux had received 1,120
Remington and Winchester rifles and 13,000 rounds of patent ammunition.
During that year they received several thousand stands of arms and more
than a million rounds of ammunition, and for three years before that
they had been regularly supplied with weapons. The Sioux uprising of
1876 was expensive for the government. One does not have to go far to
find the explanation.

Will expected to join General Crook, but on reaching Chicago he found
that General Carr was still in command of the Fifth Cavalry, and
had sent a request that Will return to his old regiment. Carr was at
Cheyenne; thither Will hastened at once. He was met at the station
by Captain Charles King, the well-known author, and later serving as
brigadier-general at Manila, then adjutant of the regiment. As the pair
rode into camp the cry went up, "Here comes Buffalo Bill!" Three ringing
cheers expressed the delight of the troopers over his return to his old
command, and Will was equally delighted to meet his quondam companions.
He was appointed guide and chief of scouts, and the regiment proceeded
to Laramie. From there they were ordered into the Black Hills country,
and Colonel Merritt replaced General Carr.

The incidents of Custer's fight and fall are so well known that it is
not necessary to repeat them here. It was a better fight than the famous
charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava, for not one of the three
hundred came fo