"You-pee!" came back the response. Then he, the women and children, filed out of the broken ground and came on. The soldier then rode up, dismounted, and, walking along beside the whole party, explained the condition of affairs.
By the time we got to where Buck and I had left the team, the soldier who gave me his horse was there. We hitched up, all piled into the wagon, and went to camp. Mr. Wood and Simpson did not get in till near dark, bringing in twenty-one hides.
Arriving at camp, we met a sergeant and six more soldiers, making nine soldiers in all. I then learned from the non-commissioned officer that there had been an order issued from the War Department a few months before, that military escorts would be furnished to all Indian hunting parties in the future.
This was for two purposes: one to see that no overt act would be perpetrated by the Indians against settlers and other hunters, and vice versa; and that this was a "Kiowa hunting party," mostly young bloods, old men, and the whole squaw outfit. But some of the worst of the warriors were held as hostages at Fort Sill.
We all knew that the past summer had been a busy one with hunters, soldiers, and Indians.
It was the Indian war of 1874. It was the year that that Spartan band of buffalo hunters, at the Adobe Walls, withstood the siege of all the able-bodied warriors of the Cheyenne, Arapahoe, Kiowa and Comanche tribes. It was that summer, on the Washita divide, that a mere apology, in point of numbers, of an escort and train guard resisted, charge after charge, with blood-curdling yells, more than a thousand of the best warriors of the southern wild Indians. It was that summer that the then Captain, Adna R. Chaffee, who had worked his way up from a private soldier, step by step, for heroic and meritorious conduct, to the position he then held, made his famous battle-field speech, near the breaks of the Red river, when he was confronted with a horde of painted, war-bonneted red-devils under old Nigger Horse. He halted his company, fronted them, right-dressed them, and said:
"Forward, boys! Charge them, and if any of you are killed I'll promote you to corporal."
It was in this country that Lieutenant Elliott was killed, and in whose honor Fort Elliott was named. It was the summer of the first big general slaughter by an army, as it were, of bold, venturesome hunters, making buffalo-hides a specialty for commercial purposes.
Was it any wonder that the Indians were mad? And this same ground that we were camping on was a portion of the Kiowas' favorite hunting-grounds. Here their ancestors had followed the chase for ages gone by.