Early in that memorable August of 1868 a band of forty Cheyenne braves, under their chief Black Kettle, came riding up from their far-away villages in the southwest, bent on a merciless murdering raid upon the unguarded frontier settlements. They were a dirty, ragged, sullen crew as ever rode out of the wilderness. Down on the Washita River their own squaws and papooses were safe in their tepees too far from civilization for any retaliatory measure to reach them.
When Black Kettle's band came to Fort Hays, after the Indian custom they made the claim of being "good Indians."
"Black Kettle loves his white soldier brothers, and his heart feels glad when he meets them," the Chief declared. "We would be like white soldiers, but we cannot, for we are Indians; but we can all be brothers. It is a long way that we have come to see you. Six moons have come and gone, and there has been no rain; the wind blows hot from the south all day and all night; the ground is hot and cracked; the grass is burned up; the buffalo wallows are dry; the streams are dry; the game is scarce; Black Kettle is poor, and his band is hungry. He asks the white soldiers for food for his braves and their squaws and papooses. All other Indians may take the war-trail, but Black Kettle will forever keep friendship with his white brothers."
Such were his honeyed words. The commander of the fort issued to each brave a bountiful supply of flour and bacon and beans and coffee. Beyond the shadow of the fort they feasted that night. The next morning they had disappeared, these loving-hearted, loyal Indians, over whom the home missionary used to weep copious tears of pity. They had gone—but whither? Black Kettle and his noble braves were not hurrying southward toward their squaws and papooses with the liberal supplies issued to them by the Government. Crossing to the Saline Valley, not good Indians, but a band of human fiends, they swept down on the unsuspecting settlements. A homestead unprotected by the husband and father was their supreme joy. Then before the eyes of the mother, little children were tortured to death, while the mother herself—God pity her—was not only tortured, but what was more cruel, was kept alive.
Across the Saline Valley, over the divide, and up the Solomon River Valley this band of demons pushed their way. Behind them were hot ashes where homes had been, and putrid, unburied bodies of murdered men and children, mutilated beyond recognition. On their ponies, bound hand and foot, were wretched, terror-stricken women. The smiling Plains lay swathed in the August sunshine, and the richness of purple twilights, and of rose-hued day dawns, and the pitiless noontime skies of brass only mocked them in their misery. Did a merciful God forget the Plains in those days of prairie conquest? No force rose up to turn Black Kettle and his murderous horde back from the imperilled settlements until loaded with plunder, their savage souls sated with cruelty, with helpless captives for promise of further fiendish sport, they headed southward and escaped untouched to their far-away village in the pleasant, grassy lands that border the Washita River.
Not all their captives went with them, however. With these "good Indians," recipients of the Fort Hays bounty, were two women, mothers of a few months, not equal to the awful tax of human endurance. These, bound hand and foot, they staked out on the solitary Plains under the blazing August skies, while their tormentors rode gayly away to join their fat, lazy squaws awaiting them in the southland by the winding Washita.
This was the story Morton was telling to me as we sat in the dusk by his cabin door. This was the condition of those fair Kansas River valleys, for the Cheyennes under Black Kettle were not the only foes here. Other Cheyenne bands, with the Sioux, the Brules, and the Dog Indians from every tribe were making every Plains trail a warpath.
"The captives are probably all dead by this time; but the crimes are not avenged, and the settlers are no safer than they were before the raid," Morton was saying. "Governor Crawford and the Governor of Colorado have urged the authorities at Washington to protect our frontier, but they have done nothing. Now General Sheridan has decided to act anyhow. He has given orders to Colonel George A. Forsyth of the U. S. Cavalry, to make up a company of picked men to go after the Cheyennes at once. There are some two hundred of them hiding somewhere out in the Solomon or the Republican River country. It is business now. No foolishness. A lot of us around here are going down to Harker to enlist. Will you go with us, Baronet? It's no boys' play. The safety of our homes is matched against the cunning savagery of the redskins. We paid fifteen million dollars for this country west of the Mississippi. If these Indians aren't driven out and made to suffer, and these women's wrongs avenged, we'd better sell the country back to France for fifteen cents. But it's no easy piece of work. Those Cheyennes know these Plains as well as you know the streets of Springvale. They are built like giants, and they fight like demons. Don't underestimate the size of the contract. I know John Baronet well enough to know that if his boy begins, he won't quit till the battle is done. I want you to go into this with your eyes open. Whoever fights the Indians must make his will before the battle begins. Forsyth's company will be made up of soldiers from the late war, frontiersmen, and scouts. You're not any one of these, but—" he hesitated a little—"when I heard your speech at Topeka I knew you had the right metal. Your spirit is in this thing. You are willing to pay the price demanded here for the hearthstones of the West."
My spirit! My blood was racing through every artery in leaps and bounds. Here was a man calmly setting forth the action that had been my very dream of heroism, and here was a call to duty, where duty and ideal blend into one. And then I was young, and thought myself at the beginning of a new life; pain of body was unknown to me; the lure of the Plains was calling to me—daring adventure, the need for courage, the patriotism that fires the young man's heart, and, at the final analysis, my loyalty to the defenceless, my secret notions of the value of the American home, my horror of Indian captivity, a horror I had known when my mind was most impressible—all these were motives driving me on. I wondered that my companion could be so calm, sitting there in the dim twilight explaining carefully what lay before me; and yet I felt the power of that calmness building up a surer strength in me. I did not dream of home that night. I chased Indians until I wakened with a scream.
"What's the matter, Baronet?" Morton asked.