er could have run down the Apaches as he did. Perhaps these were
the hardest of all the Plains Indians to find and to fight. But in 1872
Crook subdued them and concentrated them in reservations in Arizona.
Ten years later, under Geronimo, a tribe of the Apaches broke loose and
yielded to General Crook only after a prolonged war. Once again they
raided New Mexico and Arizona in 1885-6. This was the last raid of
Geronimo. He was forced by General Miles to surrender and, together
with his chief warriors, was deported to Fort Pickens in Florida. In all
these savage pitched battles and bloody skirmishes, the surprises
and murderous assaults all over the old range, there were hundreds of
settlers killed, hundreds also of our army men, including some splendid
officers. In the Custer fight alone, on the Little Big Horn, the Army
lost Custer himself, thirteen commissioned officers, and two hundred
and fifty-six enlisted men killed, with two officers and fifty-one men
wounded; a total of three hundred and twenty-three killed and wounded in
one battle. Custer had in his full column about seven hundred men. The
number of the Indians has been variously estimated. They had perhaps
five thousand men in their villages when they met Custer in this,
the most historic and most ghastly battle of the Plains. It would be
bootless to revive any of the old discussions regarding Custer and his
rash courage. Whether in error or in wisdom, he died, and gallantly. He
and his men helped clear the frontier for those who were to follow,
and the task took its toll. Thus, slowly but steadily, even though
handicapped by a vacillating governmental policy regarding the Indians,
we muddled through these great Indian wars of the frontier, our soldiers
doing their work splendidly and uncomplainingly, such work as no other
body of civilized troops has ever been asked to do or could have done
if asked. At the close of the Civil War we ourselves were a nation
of fighting men. We were fit and we were prepared. The average of our
warlike qualities never has been so high as then. The frontier produced
its own pathfinders, its own saviors, its own fighting men.

So now the frontier lay ready, waiting for the man with the plough. The
dawn of that last day was at hand.

Chapter VIII. The Cattle Kings

It is proper now to look back yet again over the scenes with which
we hitherto have had to do. It is after the railways have come to the
Plains. The Indians now a