e settlers of the Saline, the
Solomon, and the Republican valleys, and were known to have killed some
sixty-four men and women at the time General Sheridan resolved to punish
them. Forsyth had no chance to get a command of troops, but he
was allowed to enlist fifty scouts, all "first-class, hardened
frontiersmen," and with this body of fighting men he carried out the
most dramatic battle perhaps ever waged on the Plains.

Forsyth ran into the trail of two or three large Indian villages, but
none the less he followed on until he came to the valley of the South
Fork. Here the Cheyennes under the redoubtable Roman Nose surrounded
him on the 17th of September. The small band of scouts took refuge on a
brushy island some sixty yards from shore, and hastily dug themselves in
under fire.

They stood at bay outnumbered ten to one, with small prospect of escape,
for the little island offered no protection of itself, and was in
pointblank range from the banks of the river. All their horses soon were
shot down, and the men lay in the rifle pits with no hope of escape.
Roman Nose, enraged at the resistance put up by Forsyth's men, led a
band of some four hundred of his warriors in the most desperate charge
that has been recorded in all our Indian fighting annals. It was rarely
that the Indian would charge at all; but these tribesmen, stripped naked
for the encounter, and led at first by that giant warrior, who came
on shouting his defiance, charged in full view not only once but three
times in one day, and got within a hundred feet of the foot of the
island where the scouts were lying.

According to Forsyth's report, the Indians came on in regular ranks like
the cavalry of the white men, more than four hundred strong. They were
met by the fire of repeating carbines and revolvers, and they stood for
the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth fire of repeating weapons,
and still charged in! Roman Nose was killed at last within touch of the
rifle pits against which he was leading his men. The second charge
was less desperate, for the savages lost heart after the loss of their
leader. The third one, delivered towards the evening of that same day,
was desultory. By that time the bed of the shallow stream was well
filled with fallen horses and dead warriors.

Forsyth ordered meat cut from the bodies of his dead horses and buried
in the wet sand so that it might keep as long as possible. Lieutenant
Beecher, his chief of scouts, was k