SOME WESTERN BORDER CONDITIONS IN THE 50'S AND 60'S. Excerpted from "Collections of the Kansas State Historical Society, 1911-1912", Edited by Geo. W. Martin, Secretary. Vol XII., State Printing Office, Topeka, Kansas 1912, pages 1-10. submitted by Teresa Lindquist (merope@radix.net); (copyright) 2002 by Teresa Lindquist ----------------------------------------------------------------------- KSGENWEB INTERNET GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In keeping with the KSGenWeb policy of providing free information on the Internet, this data may be used by non-commercial entities, as long as this message remains on all copied material. These electronic pages cannot be reproduced in any format for profit or other gain. Copying of the files within by non-commercial individuals and libraries is encouraged. Any other use, including publication, storage in a retrieval system, or transmission by electronic, mechanical, or other means requires the written approval of the file's author. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- SOME WESTERN BORDER CONDITIONS IN THE 50'S AND 60'S. Address by the President, ALBE B. WHITING (1), Topeka, before the Kansas State Historical Society, at its thirty-fifth annual meeting, December 6, 1910. FORT RILEY(2) was located in 1853, and in 1855 a large amount of building was done to make it a five-troop cavalry post. It was an outpost west of all the Indian reservations, and a buffer to the savages of the plains, holding them away from the somewhat civilized treaty Indians and the settlers who were soon to fill the valleys of the Kaw and its tributaries. The old Mormon trail, said to have been made in 1846, left the Santa Fe trail at 110 Creek, in Osage county, and bearing northwest crossed the Kaw at a ferry on the site of Pawnee City, perhaps eighty rods down the river from the building put up for the first territorial legislature. Thence the trail ran nearly due north till it met the trails from Leavenworth and up-river towns on the Little Blue, a hundred miles away. In 1856 a government train made a trail up the Republican to the big bend near the Nebraska line, thence over to the old trail on the little Blue, and recommended this route to overland emigrants as shorter, better watered and more desirable for emigrant trains and their herds. In 1855 a few employees at Fort Riley took claims a little way up the Republican valley, although the land had not yet been surveyed. In the spring of 1856 the writer was one of some twenty, mostly single, men who took claims on this extreme frontier. In the spring of 1857 more settlers came, a few with families, and scattered along the valley of the river and tributary creeks. Within twenty miles of the fort were now about fifty persons, counting women and children. The army officers at the fort were mostly from the South, born aristocrats, as thoroughly convinced of their divine right to hold human beings in slavery as that the sun would rise in the morning. Despising labor, they had no use for the ragged frontiersmen who were trying to make homes in the wilderness, holding in especial contempt those of free- state convictions. While the fort was supposed to be a protection to the settlers, the Indians of some treaty tribes, notably the Kaws and Pawnees, and the hostiles from further west, stole our horses so regularly that we were compelled to do most of our work with oxen. And if a horse stolen by Indians from our settlement was ever recovered by the aid of the army I never knew of it. About the 20th of May, 1857, I was turning long furrows of prairie sod with four yoke of oxen, when a neighbor, Moses Younkin, from three miles away, came to me hurriedly and reported that an hour before two men, more dead than alive, had come to his cabin asking for help. These men had walked one hundred miles without food in something less than three days and two nights, to find relief for the survivors of an emigrant train robbed by Indians at Pawnee Bend, in the Republican valley. Eight wagon-loads of Arkansas travelers, each drawn by three yoke of oxen, counting twenty-five men, women and children, well provisioned for a six months' trip, en route to Oregon with a herd of 400 cattle and a few horses, comprised the outfit. They moved leisurely, traveling about 15 miles daily, and the Indians had, no doubt, dogged the train for some days, until satisfied they could capture it with small hazard to themselves. One morning just as the train was starting out of camp the Indians charged them furiously, riding through the herd and among the wagons, yelling like the demons they were, shooting arrows and bullets, stampeding the stock, killing the captain of the train, a man by the name of Smith, and three other men, wounding several others, and driving the living away from the wagons with but the scant clothing they happened to wear on a warm summer morning, and the few antiquated guns with which the men had made a feeble defense.(3) A hundred miles from food and shelter, the survivors largely women and children, some of them sick, others severely wounded, were in sore need of help. The only horse team we could muster was capable of little more speed than oxen. In fact, one of the team had been stolen by the Indians twice and abandoned after a few hours, before reaching their reservations, because he was so slow. As soon as we could mold some bullets, fill powder flasks, and from our scant stores provision the wagon with flour and meal, a side of bacon, jug of molasses, water keg, frying pans, coffee pot, lariat ropes, blankets and a few things indispensable for the relief of the sufferers, three of us hurried off on our mission. (4) I had a saddle horse. We took along in the wagon for a guide the stronger one of the two men who had come for help. We sent a man to Fort Riley, fifteen miles away, to report the facts to the commanding officer and ask for a squad of soldiers to follow us and to help us out. By ten o'clock that night a thunderstorm drove us to camp. In a few hours the sky cleared so we could follow the dim trail, and we were on our way again. After day came we got our breakfast by the river and plodded on as fast as we dare crowd our crippled horses. Crossing Huntress creek (5) just north of where Clay Center now is, we came to a long stretch of river bottom, level as a floor, where the trail made by a government train in 1856 ran for nearly ten miles in a straight line. No more beautiful prairie scene ever met the eye than this great, broad valley on that morning. It was like a sea of the brightest living green, dotted with flowers, the winding river fringed with groves in their spring dress, the uplands in the background rich in their covering of new grass, and no sign for many miles that the foot of man had ever passed that way before, save the trail we were following. To our eyes the far end of that trail ended in a lake. A mirage covered it. And presently a fast-moving body of colors surprised us, looming in the distance. Mose (sic) Younkin, old hunter and scout, was sure a body of mounted Indians was coming upon us on the run. We could not escape by retreat; our horses were too slow. We looked our guns over, shifted our ammunition to the handiest pockets, drove off the trail to get rifle-shot distance from a ravine which ran parallel with it and might afford cover to an attacking party, and went forward. A mile further on and the mirage, that was the cause of our fright, lifted, and the band of Indians dwindled to a couple of men and women, the stronger ones of the party we were in search of. Shawls worn by the women, blown by the high wind, magnified a hundred fold and distorted by the mirage, (6) had given us a good scare. We fed these famishing survivors and went on. At the mouth of Pete's creek we found Pete Dobbin, from whom the creek took its name. He had built a shack here a few weeks before, twenty-five miles from his nearest neighbor. He was glad to go along with us. Crossing Parson's creek near where the town of Clifton was built in later years, we began to find signs of the recent presence of Indians, and were anxious for the expected reinforcements from Fort Riley, as four men were a small crowd to meet the band of Indians that had plundered the train, variously estimated by the survivors at from 40 to 400. But we drove as far as our tired team could go, and camped about sundown by Elk creek, where now is the city of Clyde. Indian signs had multiplied. Darkness came on. Mose and myself agreed to take turns on guard, and mine was the first watch. Pete, too excited to sleep, got out of his blanket and insisted on staying with me. An hour later and the deep quiet of the wilderness was with us. Suddenly the stillness was broken by just a note of human voice from the bushes along the stream close by. Our dog sprang from under the wagon with a fierce bark. Our horses pulled at their lariats and seemed to sniff trouble. Pete whispered to me: "It's Indians. Let's rouse the boys." I replied: "You go through the bushes to the right; I will go to the left. If you see an Indian, shoot and shoot to kill." We made the beat and found nothing. Two hours later the clatter of horses' hoofs reached our ears, and we wakened the boys and made ready for an attack. Again a pleasant surprise. Our appeal for help to Fort Riley was flatly refused, and three of our neighbors had come on to our relief. A mile back a dog barked at them from near the trail. Feeling so insecure so near the cover of the bushes, we harnessed up and made camp one hundred yards out on the smooth prairie. Mose now stood guard while I rolled in a blanket, pillowed my head on a saddle, and tried to sleep. Perhaps an hour went by; sleep failed to come. Mose whispered to me that a bunch of stock could be dimly seen coming out of the woods and grazing quietly a half-mile away; the light was too dim to tell if Indian ponies or cattle. We reconnoitered and found thirty or forty head of cattle, part of the heard of the plundered train. Morning was not far away, and as daybreak was the usual hour for the Indians to attack, we made ready and ate our simple breakfast. Sunrise brought no Indians, and we moved out on the trail. Some ten miles along we forded Salt creek. A mile away in the river bottom a band of Indians were frantically running their ponies, urging a herd of cattle into cover of the timber. Our four horsemen rode toward them on a gallop. By the time we were within half a mile of them the cattle were out of sight and the Indians parted in two squads, one taking cover in the timber along the river, the other by the creek, inviting us to ride into their ambush, the open prairie between them some sixty rods wide. Reluctantly we left them and hurried on west. An hour later we met the last of the emigrant party, the mother and brother of its murdered captain. The larger number had slipped past our camp in the night, and while confident we were a relief party in search of them, the women were so terrorized they would not allow the men to show themselves to us. The scantily clad old lady of nearly seventy years, leaning heavily on her son, a man of forty, his head tied in a red cotton handkerchief, on his shoulder a couple of guns, and in his hand a firebrand, keeping a coal alive to light a fire at their next night's resting place, hardly able to drag their feet along, were a pitiful sight. So crazed by fear were these poor sufferers that it seemed probably the man would fire on us. At request of the others I dismounted, left my gun, and went to meet them alone. Such joy as came into their faces when certain relief had come I never saw before. The old lady had dropped exhausted on the grass. Taking a handful of sorrel from her mouth she told me it had been her only food for five days. But they were too overjoyed to eat, and cared little for the food in my haversack. The man was suffering from an arrow wound that caused his death a few months later. (7) Making them as comfortable as possible in our wagon, we turned homeward. Recrossing Salt creek, we rested for dinner, and now that the survivors were being cared for, we itched to avenge the massacre of the emigrant train and to beat the Indians out of the herd of stock they had corralled into the woods three hours before. Up the Republican from the junction of Salt creek the river describes a big curve. For a half-mile from its mouth Salt creek follows a curve with a short radius, and so the point of land between the two is like the points of a new moon, and at that time was covered with a fine growth of cottonwood and thick underbrush. In this tangle an unknown number of Indians and cattle were hidden. It was a reckless venture, but six of us were ready for it. We planned to cross the creek at its mouth, gain the cover of the timber, and make our fight. Coming to the creek, we found the banks impassable and the stream deep and miry. Following it up as far as the timber went, there was no show for us to cross, and we had to abandon our plan. Providence surely interfered to keep us from a foolhardy fight, else the probabilities are strong that this story would never have been written. Going homeward, within a few miles we picked up a dozen or more of the emigrant party who had slipped by us in the darkness of the previous night. They were in a pitiful plight; women and children now for nearly a week without food, some suffering from wounds. One young woman was shot through the body with a rifle ball, and another bullet, striking her in the back, had passed up through her shoulder and lodged in her neck. Every moment since the massacre they had lived in dread of the savages returning and butchering them, and, famished as they were, they could not eat. At nightfall we camped at Pete Dobbin's cabin, and felt quite secure and safe from attack. Hunger came with the feeling of security, and until near midnight our frying pans were kept busy baking cakes for the crowd. After satisfying our appetites, all save two guards lay down to sleep. So worn out were both rescued and rescuers that a good shower falling as we lay under the open sky failed to awaken one of us. Even Mose slept through it all, and when he fired his good old rifle in the morning to make sure it was in order he was surprised at the jet of water that came from its muzzle. Near noon that day, east of the present site of Clay Center, we met a United States exploring party, 130 wagons with two companies of dragoons for escort. They had left Fort Riley two days before for a summer trip. The commanding officer interviewed the rescued parties, inquiring into the details of the attack on the wagon train. "Did n't you know that you were in the Indian country and that the Indians were hostile?" "No." "Did n't you keep guard nights?" "No." "When you saw prowlers around the camp, as you say, and your lariat ropes were cut at night, did n't you know it was the work of Indians?" To all these questions the innocent Arkansas travelers gave negative answers. "Blank you, you ought to have been robbed!" was the commander's disgusted exclamation as they told of the ignorance and folly that had cost them so dear. That night we reached the settlements, and the next day took the party to Fort Riley, where the wounded were cared for in the hospital and all were provided with food and clothing. As the officers in command at Fort Riley refused to take any steps to recover the property stolen from the train by the Indians, the survivors appealed to their rescuers to make an effort in their behalf, as they had lost their earthly all and were in sore need, offering us any portion of the stock we saw fit to ask, as an inducement to again risk our lives for them. Relying on the vicinity of the exploring expedition to make the trip more safe, we at once got together every available man and horse in the region, and mustered fourteen men. Just as we were starting from our rendezvous, twenty miles from Fort Riley, one of our men had an arm nearly torn off by the accidental discharge of a rifle, the flattened bullet cutting a track a foot long across his abdomen. The materials for "first aid" in that party were confined to shirts and handkerchiefs in use, but we did what we could, and his special friend Mose Younkin, was detailed to get him home, while the writer, as best acquainted at Fort Riley, was to ride there and secure surgical help for the terribly wounded man. It was late in the afternoon, and the day was very hot for a day in May. By an unexpected chance to change horses about midway on my route, I got a fresh mount and made the twenty miles in two hours. Going at once to the quarters of the commanding officer and stating my errand, I was astounded by a flat refusal on his part to do one thing to help our wounded friend. He, at best, would only refer me to the post surgeon, who could have his consent to do as he pleased in the matter. The post surgeon was worse than indifferent to my pleadings for help for the father of a family of young children, sorely wounded in a service that rightly belonged to the army. He was as sympathetic as an iceberg, and warmly assured me that to go to his relief would be such a violation of orders as would subject him to court martial and severe penalty. For once in my life I was fast losing faith in the government, as represented by such brutes wearing its uniform. I was reared to be strictly orthodox and to avoid profanity, but never in a long life have so burned to express in the strongest language my contempt for any one as at that moment; and I should have done it had I thought it would have accomplished my end. What could I do? It was growing dark, and twenty miles to the next place where surgical aid could be hoped for. The chances were all against the wounded man surviving the time it would require for me to ride further. Devoutly I prayed, "God help me!" Then it came to my mind that my friend was a Mason, and that somewhere in the post was an ordnance sergeant, likewise a Mason, and a personal friend of the wounded man. I found him; I gave him the facts quickly. I had found the key to all the doors in Fort Riley! That commanding officer and that post surgeon were Masons. As soon as an ambulance could be harnessed and supplies put on board, the hospital steward, who was a competent surgeon, with an assistant and a driver, followed me out for seventeen miles in the darkness over a dim trail to the home of the wounded man. His wounds were dressed, and the next day the post surgeon went out in his carriage and took him to the hospital at Fort Riley, where he was given the best of care until he fully recovered. As a man and a good and useful citizen he might suffer and die for lack of care and attention, those officers as indifferent as if he had been a yellow dog; but as a Mason they would give him the full measure of the Golden Rule. More than half a century has rolled by since that day of strenuous work and excitement. I hope I have forgiven those army officers. I am not quite sure of it, for, as I recall that anxious hour when I pleaded for help, my blood warms, and none will wonder that it took many years and an acquaintance with another type of Masons to remove my prejudice against the order. The next day, having done what we could for our wounded friend, Mose and I again took the trail, following our party up the river. Thirty miles from home we began to find straggling bunches of cattle, quite contented to stay along the river and creeks where the pasturage was so rich and abundant. We drove them out of the pockets where they were hidden and started them down the valley. We camped one night on Pete's creek some ten miles from the river, and never in my life did I see such swarms of hungry mosquitos. We dared not build a fire, as we were hiding from the Indians, and tethered our horses some distance from where we tried in vain to sleep. The next day we started homeward, taking with us a beautiful young fawn we caught on the prairie. A week later our party came in with about two-thirds of the cattle stolen from the train. They reported reaching the place of massacre at the same time as the United States exploring expedition, whose officers were satisfied, after examining conditions there, that the robbing was the work of Pawnees a tribe supposed to be at peace with the whites, and not hostile. It was not an uncommon thing in those times for treaty Indians to rob trains and frontier settlers, hoping to have their deviltry charged up to the hostile tribes. The robbers had taken the covers off the wagons, looted them of all clothing and bedding, emptied flour, meal and dried fruit on the ground, and carried off the sacks. One wounded man had crawled into a wagon loaded with bacon and died there. The remains of the other three lay on the ground near by, where they had fallen, and were a horrible sight. They buried the dead and fired the wagon of bacon. Later, a trip was made by some of our party to bring in the remaining wagons. The result of our work secured to the survivors of the massacre quite a portion of their stock and was a great relief to them. To me it seemed an outrage that the army officers of the United States, with ample men and material at hand, would do absolutely nothing to help us in rescuing the survivors of the plundered train, but left it to a handful of frontiersmen to go out on these errands of mercy. Later developments made it clear to us that these army officers, with their Southern proclivities, would have been pleased had the Indians scalped every free-state man on the frontier. The robbery of this emigrant train was the first murderous outbreak of the Indians on the whites in the Republican valley. As the settlements in the next few years extended farther up the river, the outlying farms were often raided by hostile bands, and all the horrors of savage brutality were visited on the helpless frontiersmen. Hunting parties out for buffalo meat were killed and their bodies left to bleach on the prairies. My friend, Walter Haynes, (8) with two Collins boys and a couple of neighbors from near Clifton, went out for meat and never came back. A party in search of them found their remains around their overturned wagon, their dead oxen stuck full of arrows, and evidences of a desperate running fight for several miles. Andy Thompson, a Dane, of prominent Copenhagen connections, for two years a member of my family, was visiting in the Solomon valley. He joined the settlers in defending their homes during and Indian raid, was enticed away from the stockade, shot and scalped. Nelson Beeman, a neighbor, went out on the buffalo range to kill wolves for their pelts. He made one successful trip; from the next no word ever came back. The Great Plains were as remorseless as the ocean, swallowing up many who ventured out upon them, and the savage nomads roaming over them were as merciless as sharks. In the decade from '60 to '70 scores of men fell victim to the Indian lust for blood and plunder, and the friends of the lost never knew when or how they met their fate. In after years the rusty irons of a wagon or ox yoke, that fire would not burn, found here and there on the Great Plains told of an unwritten tragedy. Houses were plundered and burned, stock killed or driven away, women outraged and carried off captive to a life compared with which death would have been sweet. Men, women and children were butchered and their bodies savagely mutilated. The government at Washington, engaged in the great Civil War, could not respond to appeals for protection sent in from the frontier. Even after the close of the war, in 1867 I think it was, General Sherman, on a tour of inspection of western military posts, came down the Republican valley, and in reply to appeals for protection by the army bluntly told the settlers to move back (9) they were too far out; the government could not afford to protect such scattered settlements. A plan was devised on the frontier, and urged on the War Department, to protect it with a small force stationed on the larger streams to the west of the settlement the Platte, Republican, Solomon and Saline; to keep a daily patrol across the country, and in readiness, in case a band of hostiles should cross their line, to follow them at once. Finally, in 1870, (10) two companies of cavalry, under command of Colonel Montgomery, were ordered to this duty, and the frontier breathed freer. Two weeks later the writer, on an exploring tour, found this command in camp at Lake Sibley, fort miles inside the outmost settlement. Colonel Montgomery admitted to me privately that he was doing no good, but must obey orders and could not criticise (sic) the plans of his superiors. Exasperated by this trifling of the War Department, I wrote our senator, Hon. E.G. Ross, (11) at Washington, detailing conditions and urging him to go to the Secretary of War and ask him if he was depending on the frontier settlers of Kansas to protect themselves, and to stand picket guard for his soldiers besides. Mr. Ross read this letter on the floor of the senate. An immediate order was issued to Colonel Montgomery to move out and establish a patrol line beyond the settlements. This done, Indian raids in the Republican, Solomon, Saline and Smoky Hill valleys were at an end, so far as the hostiles from the west were concerned, for all time. A sentimental regard for the wrongs of "Lo, the poor Indian," in the then predominant eastern states, arising from an utter miscomprehension of conditions on the frontier, long overshadowed the rights of the settlers, and resulted in subjecting them for a dozen years to a life of terror only paralleled in annals of unrestrained savage warfare. The settlers on the border were accused of dealing unfairly with the Indians, driving them off their hunting grounds, overreaching them in trade, and taking their homes from them. Nothing could be more untrue of conditions on the Kansas frontier. These raids were on lands where the Indian title was extinguished by treaty, and which had been surveyed and thrown open for pre-emption by the government. The raiders, for the most part, were roving bands of hostile tribes. Their victims rarely saw them, except when, as unexpected as thunderbolts out of clear skies, they rode through the settlements and left death and desolation along their trails. === NOTE 1.--[biography of ALBE B. WHITING]. NOTE 2. [biography of BENNET RILEY]. NOTE 3. "The train camped for the last time in the valley at that point in Republic county where the old military road left the Republican and struck across the prairie for the Little Blue, more than one hundred miles from Fort Riley. This point was at or near the present site of Republic City. Just as the train was hitching up to roll out of camp in the early morning the Indians charged, shouting, through the train, and shooting in every direction, to stampede the stock and drive the owners from the train. All was disorder and confusion, and little resistance was made. They fled from the train, many of them just as they arose from their beds. Smith, the captain and largest owner, in attempting to escape on a horse, was shot, his body stripped of valuables and mutilated in a shocking manner. "Four of the men in the train were killed, others wounded, one young woman very seriously. But plunder, not blood, was the object of the Indians, and as soon as the whites left the train they left them to their fate and ransacked the wagons. A keg of whisky found among the loading soon had the whole band engaged in a drunken revel; but, while the emigrants saw from the hills the Indians drunk to helplessness, they dared not attempt to recapture the train. "Their drunken orgies over, the Indians loaded their ponies from the train. The wagon covers were stripped off, sacks of flour, meal and dried fruit were poured on the ground, that the bags might be carried away, the clothing packed on the ponies, and, driving the herd of stock, they started for their camp whereever that might be. "The events of after years satisfied the settlers in the Republican valley that the robbery was committed by the Pawnees, nominally friendly, but ever ready to rob and murder when they thought it would be charged up to the Sioux, Cheyennes and other hostile tribes on the plains. "Meanwhile the emigrants turned away from the train without food or the means of procuring it. With half the men in the party killed, including the captain; with several children, the wounded woman to care for, and ninety miles from the settlement, they were in danger of starvation." History of Republic County, I.O. Savage, 1901, p. 45. See, also, an account of this massacre in F.G. Adams' Homestead Guide, 1873, p. 219. NOTE 4. [biographies of MOSES and WILLIAM YOUNKIN]. NOTE 5. Huntress creek was named for Orville Huntress, who in 1861 opened a hotel and a store at the point where the military road crossed the creek. Cutler's History of Kansas, 1883, p. 1312. NOTE 6. See Robert M. Wright's description of a mirage, page 66, volume 7, Kansas Historical Collections. Mr. Wright has always believed that in a mirage once, near Larned, he saw the greatest city in the world London, St. Petersburg, or Paris, he judged, by the domes, spires and minarets and style of buildings. Philip St. George Cooke, in his Scenes and Adventures in the Army, 1857, pp. 318-321, gives a most interesting account of a mirage on the plains of Nebraska. NOTE 7. "The sixth day after the attack the relieving party found the last of the emigrants about thirty miles from the scene of the butchery. An old white-headed woman, her long hair streaming in the wind, almost borne on the shoulder of her son, he fainting from the wound of a poisoned arrow that afterwards caused his death, having on his other arm a couple of old muskets, and a firebrand in his hand both haggard, dirty, bloody and wild they presented a spectacle once seen never to be forgotten. And when the certainty of help and relief came to them their utter prostration and helplessness told, as words could not, the sufferings they had endured. "It is a sufficient commentary on the administration of James Buchanan that in a case like this, with six companies of cavalry at Fort Riley, not a man nor a gun nor a ration could be had for the relief of this unfortunate party till after a handful of poor frontier settlers had gone out, gathered them up and brought them to the fort. And this is only one of many instances where frontier settlers in Kansas, and notably in Republic county, 'stood picket' for the United States troops, who were placed near the frontier, ostensibly for its protection. "The survivors of the emigrants mostly returned to Arkansas, a few, however, remaining in Kansas." History of Republic County, by I.O. Savage, 1901, p. 44. NOTE 8. "In 1865 immigrants and buffalo hunters often penetrated within the Indian hunting grounds. In the summer (May) of 1866 Lewis Cassel, Walter Haynes and two sons of William Collins started out with three wagons two horse teams and one ox team from near Clifton, six miles east of Clyde, on a hunt. They did not return. Two weeks after they left home a party of thirty settlers, under the command of Capt. G.D. Brooks, went in search, but returned without finding the men. A second party, however, under the same leader, made a more successful search, and found the dead bodies of all the hunters on Cheyenne creek, about 10 miles west of where Concordia now is. Traces showed that there had been a desperate running fight of some eight miles, the Indians driving the white men till the creek was reached, where they were ambushed and all killed, scalped and horribly mutilated. The bodies were taken to Clifton and buried." Homestead Guide, F.G. Adams, 1873, p. 245. (See, also, Cutler's History of Kansas, 1883, pp. 1015, 1313.) NOTE 9. "Lieutenant General Sherman,...who has repeatedly said that the settlers have 'no business on these lands.'" Report Adjutant General, 1868, p. 8. NOTE 10. "United States troops were stationed through 1870 in the Republican, Solomon and Saline valleys, scouting parties patrolling the line of exposure." Cutler's History of Kansas, 1883, p. 211. NOTE 11. [biography of EDWARD GIBSON ROSS].