That summer he led a squadron of cavalry that attacked six hundred Sioux, and in that fight against overwhelming odds he brought down a chief at a range of four hundred yards, in those days a very long shot. His victim proved to be Tall Bull, one of the great war leaders of the Sioux. The widow of Tall Bull was proud that her husband had been killed by so famous a warrior as Prairie Chief, for that was Cody’s name among the Indians.
There is one very nice story about the Pawnee scouts. A new general had taken command who must have all sorts of etiquette proper to soldiers. It was all very well for the white sentries to call at intervals of the night from post to post: “Post Number One, nine o’clock, all’s well!” “Post Number Two, etc.”
But when the Pawnee sentries called, “Go to hell, I don’t care!” well, the practise had to be stopped.
Of Buffalo Bill’s adventures in these wars the plain record would only take one large volume, but he was scouting in company with Texas Jack, John Nelson, Belden, the White Chief, and so many other famous frontier heroes, each needing at least one book volume, that I must give the story up as a bad job. At the end of the Sioux campaign Buffalo Bill was chief of scouts with the rank of colonel.
Colonel Cody
(“Buffalo Bill”)
In 1876, General Custer, with a force of nearly four hundred cavalry, perished in an attack on the Sioux, and the only survivor was his pet boy scout, Billy Jackson, who got away at night disguised as an Indian. Long afterward Billy, who was one of God’s own gentlemen, told me that story while we sat on a grassy hillside watching a great festival of the Blackfeet nation.
After the battle in which Custer—the Sun Child—fell, the big Sioux army scattered, but a section of it was rounded up by a force under the guidance of Buffalo Bill.
“One of the Indians,” he says, “who was handsomely decorated with all the ornaments usually worn by a war chief ... sang out to me ‘I know you, Prairie Chief; if you want to fight come ahead and fight me!’