rked trails,
and the only timber to be found--which generally grew only along the
streams--was so scraggy and worthless as hardly to deserve the name.
Nor was water by any means plentiful, even though the section is
traversed by important streams, the Republican, the Smoky Hill, the
Arkansas, the Cimarron, and the Canadian all flowing eastwardly, as
do also their tributaries in the main. These feeders are sometimes
long and crooked, but as a general thing the volume of water is
insignificant except after rain-falls. Then, because of unimpeded
drainage, the little streams fill up rapidly with torrents of water,
which quickly flows off or sinks into the sand, leaving only an
occasional pool without visible inlet or outlet.

At the period of which I write, in 1868, the Plains were covered with
vast herds of buffalo--the number has been estimated at 3,000,000
head--and with such means of subsistence as this everywhere at hand,
the 6,000 hostiles were wholly unhampered by any problem of
food-supply. The savages were rich too according to Indian standards,
many a lodge owning from twenty to a hundred ponies; and
consciousness of wealth and power, aided by former temporizing, had
made them not only confident but defiant. Realizing that their
thorough subjugation would be a difficult task, I made up my mind to
confine operations during the grazing and hunting season to
protecting the people of the new settlements and on the overland
routes, and then, when winter came, to fall upon the savages
relentlessly, for in that season their ponies would be thin, and weak
from lack of food, and in the cold and snow, without strong ponies to
transport their villages and plunder, their movements would be so
much impeded that the troops could overtake them.

At the outbreak of hostilities I had in all, east of New Mexico, a
force of regulars numbering about 2,600 men--1,200 mounted and 1,400
foot troops. The cavalry was composed of the Seventh and Tenth
regiments; the infantry, of the Third and Fifth regiments and four
companies of the Thirty-Eighth. With these few troops all the posts
along the Smoky Hill and Arkansas had to be garrisoned, emigrant
trains escorted, and the settlements and routes of travel and the
construction parties on the Kansas-Pacific railway protected. Then,
too, this same force had to furnish for the field small movable
columns, that were always on the go, so it will be rightly inferred
that every available