upon
than the prudent forethought of a month. He had to combat, in the
newly-acquired territory, the cunning of tribes whose natural ferocity
was sharpened into vindictiveness by the encroachments upon their soil
of a new and strange people; and every association with the intruders,
who were for the most part men of little reputation and less principle,
had developed in the Indians only the fiercest and most decided
animosity. To encounter their vigilance with watchfulness as alert, to
confound their swift counsels with sudden alarm, to penetrate their
ambuscades and anticipate their cunning with incessant activity, to be,
in short, ubiquitous, was the duty of Captain Lyon.

After years spent in the uncertain tactics of this half barbaric
warfare, he was removed, in the height of political strife in Kansas, to
its very centre. Here, while comparatively free from the wearisome
requirements of active service such as had been demanded in California,
and at a time when events the most portentous proved clearly to the
great minds of the country the advance of a political crisis whose
consequences must be most important, involving--should deep-laid
conspiracy be successful--the bankruptcy of principle and that
high-handed outrage, the triumph, of a minority,--Captain Lyon had full
liberty and abundant opportunity to settle for himself the great
questions mooted in the Missouri Compromises, the Lecompton
Constitutions and the Dred Scott decisions of the day. To a mind
unprejudiced, except as the honest impulses of every honest man's heart
are always prejudiced in favor of the right, there was but a single
decision. Disgusted with the heartless policy which democracy had for so
many years pursued, and which now threatened to culminate either in its
utter degradation at the North, or in the establishment in the South of
an oligarchy which would annihilate all free action and suppress all
free opinion, he severed his connection with that party,--a step to
which he was also impelled by the injustice that was then seeking to
force upon the people of Kansas an institution which they condemned as
unproductive and expensive, to say nothing of their moral repugnance to
the very A B C of its principles. It was at this time that Captain Lyon
contributed to the _Manhattan Express_, a weekly journal of the
neighborhood, a series of papers in which he took an earnest, manly and
decided stand in favor of the principles which his thoughtful m