and
laid its rails along the great white wagon-road of the Oregon Trail and
the Overland Trail, which already had split the buffalo herds. The
Sioux and the Northern Cheyennes fought it in Nebraska, they fought it
in Wyoming; until in 1868 it still had not been stopped, it was lunging
on straight for the mountains, and in the treaty that promised him the
hunting grounds north of it Chief Red Cloud also promised to let it
alone.

The Cheyennes, their allies from the Sioux and the Arapahos, made no
such promise regarding the Kansas Pacific. The Union Pacific "thunder
wagons" had divided the buffalo into the northern and the southern
herds; now the southern herd was to be divided again. A line of forts
was creeping on; the soldiers were increasing; and the "thunder wagons"
were to travel back and forth between the Missouri River and Denver,
frightening the buffalo that grazed in central Kansas, and bringing in
hunters to kill them.

"If the road does not stop," said Chief Roman Nose of the Cheyennes, "I
shall be the white man's enemy forever."

By the fall of 1868 the rails had reached four hundred and twelve
miles, almost clear across northern Kansas, to Fort Wallace near the
border of Colorado. Every mile of the last two hundred and more had
been a fight; wellnigh every mile of these same had been stained red;
all western Kansas was a battle ground, upon which settlers, soldiers,
surveyors and track-builders gave up their lives. The Cheyennes lost
heavily, but they showed no signs of quitting. They were getting worse.

At the end of August General Phil Sheridan, who commanded the Military
Division of the Missouri, directed Major George A. Forsythe of the
Ninth Cavalry to enlist fifty scouts and ride against the
Indians--fight them in their own way. He left Fort Wallace on the
morning of August 29; struck a broad Indian trail leading northward;
early in the morning of September 17 was surprised by six hundred
Cheyennes, Sioux and Arapahos, and was forced to entrench upon a little
island in the Arikaree River of eastern Colorado not far from the
Nebraska line; and here he stood off the charges of the Indian
horsemen--five hundred at once.

All that day the fight was waged. Major Forsythe was wounded three
times; Lieutenant Beecher was killed; Surgeon Mooers was dying; all the
horses were dead; horse-flesh was the only food and the enemy had
ringed the island with rifle-fire.

This evening volunteers were c