for the senatorship
in Dakota, he has left no record of it. Howard Eaton spoke to him once
about it. He was interested and even a little stirred, it appeared, at
the possibility of representing the frontier in the United States
Senate as, half a century previous, Thomas H. Benton, of Tennessee,
whom he greatly admired, had represented it. But the thought failed to
take permanent hold of him. He was, moreover, thinking of himself in
those days more as a writer than as a politician.

The autumn was not without excitement. A small band of Indians began
here and there to set fire to the prairie grass, and before the
cattlemen realized what was happening, thousands of acres of winter
feed lay blackened and desolate.

This act of ruthless destruction was the climax of a war of reprisals
which had been carried on relentlessly between the Indians and the
white men since the first bold pioneer had entered the West Missouri
country. There was endless trouble and bad blood between the races,
which at intervals flared up in an outrage, the details of which were
never told in print because they were as a rule unprintable. In the
region between the Little Missouri and the Yellowstone, in the years
1884 and 1885, the wounds left by the wars, which had culminated in
the death of Custer at the Little Big Horn, were still open and sore.
In the conflict between white and red, the Indians were not always
the ones who were most at fault. In many cases the robberies and other
crimes which were committed were the acts of men maddened by
starvation, for the ranges where they had hunted had been taken from
them, and the reservations in many cases offered insufficient food.
The agents of the Great White Father, moreover, were not always
over-careful to give them all the cattle and the ponies which the
Government was by treaty supposed to grant them. In consequence they
"lifted" a cow or a calf where they could. The cattlemen, on their
part, thoroughly imbued with the doctrine of _might is right_,
regarded the Indians as a public enemy, and were disposed to treat
their ponies and any other property which they might possess as
legitimate prize of war. There was, in fact, during the middle
eighties, open and undisguised warfare between red and white
throughout the region whose eastern border was the Bad Lands. It was,
moreover, a peculiarly atrocious warfare. Many white men shot whatever
Indians they came upon like coyotes, on sight; others capt