The next day I left the fort for Topeka. My determination to stay in the
struggle was not merely a young man's love of adventure, nor was my
declaration of what would be done to the Indian tribes an idle boast.
The tragic days of Kansas were not all in its time of territorial strife
and border ruffianism. The story of the Western Plains--the short grass
country we call it now--in the decade following the Civil War is a
tragedy of unparalleled suffering and danger and heroism. In the cold
calculation of the official reports the half-year I had entered on has
its tabulated record of one hundred and fifty-eight men murdered,
sixteen wounded, forty-one scalped, fourteen women tortured, four women
and twenty-four children carried into captivity. And nearly all this
record was made in the Saline and Solomon and Republican River valleys
in Kansas.

The Summer of the preceding year a battalion of soldiers called the
Eighteenth Kansas Cavalry spent four months on the Plains. Here they met
and fought two deadly foes, the Indians and the Asiatic cholera. Theirs
was a record of bravery and endurance; and their commander, Major Horace
L. Moore, keeps always a place in my own private hall of fame.

Winter had made good Indians out of the savage wretches, as usual; but
the Summer of 1868 brought that official count of tragedy with all the
unwritten horror that history cannot burden itself to carry. Only one
thing seemed feasible now, to bear the war straight into the heart of
the Indian country in a winter campaign, to deal an effectual blow to
the scourge of the Plains, this awful menace to the frontier homes.
General Sheridan had asked Kansas to furnish a cavalry regiment for
United States military service for six months.

The capital city was a wide-awake place that October. The call for
twelve hundred men was being answered by the veterans of the Plains and
by the young men of Kansas. The latter took up the work as many a
volunteer in the Civil War began it--in a sort of heyday of excitement
and achievement. They gave little serious thought to the cost, or the
history their record was to make. But in the test that followed they
stood, as the soldiers of the nation had stood before them, courageous,
unflinching to the last. Little notion had those rollicking young
fellows of what lay before them--a winter campaign in a strange country
infested by a fierce and cunning foe who observed no etiquette of
civilized warfare.

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