attack on the great emigrant encampment was a thing which had
been preparing for years. The increasing number of the white men, the
lessening numbers of the buffalo, meant inevitable combat with all the
tribes sooner or later.

Now the spring hunt of the northern Plains tribes was on. Five hundred
lodges of the Sioux stood in one village on the north side of the
Platte. The scaffolds were red with meat, everywhere the women were
dressing hides and the camp was full of happiness. For a month the great
Sioux nation had prospered, according to its lights. Two hundred stolen
horses were under the wild herdsmen, and any who liked the meat of the
spotted buffalo might kill it close to camp from the scores taken out of
the first caravans up the Platte that year--the Mormons and other early
trailers whom the Sioux despised because their horses were so few.

But the Sioux, fat with _boudins_ and _depouille_ and marrowbones, had
waited long for the great Western train which should have appeared on
the north side of the Platte, the emigrant road from the Council Bluffs.
For some days now they had known the reason, as Jim Bridger had
explained--the wagons had forded the river below the Big Island. The
white men's medicine was strong.

The Sioux did not know of the great rendezvous at the forks of the Great
Medicine Road. Their watchmen, stationed daily at the eminences along
the river bluffs of the north shore, brought back scoffing word of the
carelessness of the whites. When they got ready they, too, would ford
the river and take them in. They had not heeded the warning sent down
the trail that no more whites should come into this country of the
tribes. It was to be war.

And now the smoke signals said yet more whites were coming in from the
south! The head men rode out to meet their watchmen. News came back that
the entire white nation now had come into the valley from the south and
joined the first train.

Here then was the chance to kill off the entire white nation, their
women and their children, so there would be none left to come from
toward the rising sun! Yes, this would end the race of the whites
without doubt or question, because they all were here. After killing
these it would be easy to send word west to the Arapahoes and Gros
Ventres and Cheyennes, the Crows, the Blackfeet, the Shoshones, the
Utes, to follow west on the Medicine Road and wipe out all who had gone
on West that year and the year before. Then the P