he base of the Wichita Mountains
near Fort Sill in southwestern Oklahoma. He built himself a large
two-story house, well painted and furnished; he lived like a rich
rancher, and owned thousands of acres of farm and thousands of cattle;
he wore the finest of white-man's clothes, or the finest of chief's
clothes as suited him; he was still living there, in 1910, and no man
was more highly respected. He rode in the parade at Washington when
Theodore Roosevelt was inaugurated President. President Roosevelt paid
him a return visit, for a wolf hunt.

But the old-time buffalo-hunters who were in Adobe Walls on June 24,
1874, never have forgotten that charge by the Quana Parker fierce
cavalry.

CHAPTER XXI

WHITE MEN AT BAY AGAIN (1874)

THE "FIGHT OF THE PRIVATES"

When the news of the attack upon Adobe Walls had gone forth, and
reports of other raids followed thick and fast, the army in Texas,
Kansas and Indian Territory were ordered out. Plainly enough, there
was a great Indian uprising. The reservation peace had been broken.

Colonel Nelson A. Miles of the Fifth United States Infantry was
directed to march from Fort Dodge on the Arkansas River just below
Dodge City in south-western Kansas, and strike the Indians in Texas.
He took eight troops of the Sixth Cavalry, four companies of the Fifth
Infantry, a section of artillery, twenty-five white scouts and a party
of Delaware Indian scouts who were led by their gray-haired old chief,
Fall Leaf.

Three other army columns, one from Texas in the south, one from New
Mexico in the southwest, one from Indian Territory in the northeast,
also were starting from the same place: the Staked Plain region of
western and northwestern Texas.

Colonel Miles refitted at Camp Supply, one hundred miles south of Fort
Dodge, and pushed on toward Adobe Walls.

His advance of scouts and one troop of cavalry were just in time to
help save Adobe Walls from yet another attack by Comanches and Kiowas.
But the little garrison of buffalo-hunters were still full of fight,
and the heads of the twelve Indians still grinned down from the pickets
of the corral.

The Indians fled southwest, for the Staked Plain. Colonel Miles
pursued and had a brush or two. The marches were long and hard,
through a very hot, dry country where the only water was bad. Soldiers
suffered so from thirst that some of them opened veins in their own
arms and sucked the blood.

The Staked Plain country is a