illed, as also were Surgeon Mooers,
and Scouts Smith, Chalmers, Wilson, Farley, and Day. Seventeen others
of the party were wounded, some severely. Forsyth himself was shot three
times, once in the head. His left leg was broken below the knee, and
his right thigh was ripped up by a rifle ball, which caused him extreme
pain. Later he cut the bullet out of his own leg, and was relieved from
some part of the pain. After his rescue, when his broken leg was set it
did not suit him, and he had the leg broken twice in the hospital and
reset until it knitted properly.

Forsyth's men lay under fire under a blazing sun in their holes on the
sandbar for nine days. But the savages never dislodged them, and at last
they made off, their women and children beating the death drums, and the
entire village mourning the unreturning brave. On the second day of the
fighting Forsyth had got out messengers at extreme risk, and at length
the party was rescued by a detachment of the Tenth Cavalry. The Indians
later said that they had in all over six hundred warriors in this fight.
Their losses, though variously estimated, were undoubtedly heavy.

It was encounters such as this which gradually were teaching the Indians
that they could not beat the white men, so that after a time they began
to yield to the inevitable.

What is known as the Baker Massacre was the turning-point in the
half-century of warfare with the Blackfeet, the savage tribe which
had preyed upon the men of the fur trade in a long-continued series of
robberies and murders. On January 22, 1870, Major E. M. Baker, led by
half-breeds who knew the country, surprised the Piegans in their winter
camp on the Marias River, just below the border. He, like Custer,
attacked at dawn, opening the encounter with a general fire into the
tepees. He killed a hundred and seventy-three of the Piegans, including
very many women and children, as was unhappily the case so often in
these surprise attacks. It was deplorable warfare. But it ended the
resistance of the savage Blackfeet. They have been disposed for peace
from that day to this.

The terrible revenge which the Sioux and Cheyennes took in the battle
which annihilated Custer and his men on the Little Big Horn in the
summer of 1876; the Homeric running fight made by Chief Joseph of the
Nez Perces--a flight which baffled our best generals and their men for
a hundred and ten days over more than fourteen hundred miles of
wilderness--these are