At the outbreak of the Sioux, in 1890 and 1891, Colonel Cody served at the head of the Nebraska National Guard. In 1895 Cody took up the development of Wyoming Valley by introducing irrigation. Not long afterward he became judge advocate general of the Wyoming National Guard.
Colonel Cody (Buffalo Bill) died in Denver, Colorado, on January 10, 1917. His legacy to a grateful world was a large share in the development of the West, and a multitude of achievements in horsemanship, marksmanship, and endurance that will live for ages. His life will continue to be a leading example of the manliness, courage, and devotion to duty that belonged to a picturesque phase of American life now passed, like the great patriot whose career it typified, into the Great Beyond.
BUFFALO BILL AMONG THE SIOUX.
CHAPTER I.
WILD BILL’S CLOSE CALL.
One summer morning, in the sixties, when the Indians in the West and Southwest were still giving much trouble to Uncle Sam’s settlers and soldiers, and when the great railway lines were being pushed forward across the continent to the Pacific coast, a scout rode across country in Kansas from Fort Larned to another military post, about sixty miles distant.
He was carrying the military mail and dispatches from one fort to another, and his mission was an exceedingly dangerous one, for it was known that the Indians in Kansas and the neighboring territory were on the point of rising to attack the whites, if they had not already risen.
Many reports had been received from scouts familiar with the Indians which showed that an alliance was being arranged between several of the tribes with the object of going on the warpath in numbers strong enough, as they imagined, to enable them to bid defiance to Uncle Sam’s troopers, even though the latter were armed with the quick-firing “devil guns” so much feared by the redskins.