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MEDICINE BLUFF CREEK, I. T., February 17, 1868.

Yesterday we made peace with the Kiowas, and released their two head chiefs, Satanta and Lone Wolf. We are now waiting the arrival of the train with supplies from Arbuckle, when we will at once bid a final adieu to this part of the country, and set out in a westerly direction, intending to treat with the Cheyennes at some point west of here, then turn our faces northward to Camp Supply.

MEDICINE BLUFF CREEK, February 20th.

It is a bright and pleasant morning, such as we often had in Texas. The climate here is lovely, seldom a day that even a light coat is uncomfortable. We have mistletoe here as plentifully as in Texas. The scenery is sublime picturesque in the extreme; the climate all that can be desired—not surpassed, I imagine, by Italy; and such lovely sunsets! …I wish you could see with what awe I am held by the Indians. A sound drubbing, you know, always produces this. They have given me a name, Mon-to-e-te, which means Strong Arm.

I cannot write but a few lines this evening, as I am now using the last piece of candle which can be obtained anywhere in camp. So bountifully are we supplied with Government stores that not an officer here, from General Sheridan down, has any light; nor have they had for several nights, nor will we have until the arrival of the train of supplies. How we shall spend the long evenings I do not know—sleep, I presume.

As soon as the train of supplies arrives, I expect to move west about one hundred miles, through the Washita mountains, to see if the Cheyennes are in that vicinity; then I turn northward to Camp Supply. Tell Eliza I am tired of living on roast horse and parched corn, as we have had to, and I will soon be at home, and want soup every day.

General Sheridan hastens to Camp Supply, and will start with a train of supplies to meet me somewhere in the vicinity of the Washita battle-field. You see I am telling you our plans, when not a single officer of this command dreams of our destination, and all are wondering when we are going. I am telling you just as if I were with you. Look on the map and find a point on Cache Creek about one hundred miles due west from Fort Arbuckle. That is where we now are. When we move it will be nearly due south-west, following the Red River. There we expect to accomplish the object of our western detour, and will then be nearly on a line due south from Fort Dodge. I am thus minute in order that you may see what a vast extent of country we will have visited since the beginning of my experience on the plains.

Once back to Camp Supply, nothing further can be accomplished for some time; our horses will be worn out, many of them now being unable to proceed that far.

The horses are being fed on grass alone, running loose night and day. They come in at the sound of water-call as regularly and promptly as if led. The men are living on half rations of bread.

No officers' stores for the coming march. I intend to have driven along with us one hundred and fifty head of Texas cattle, so that we will not be compelled to eat horse-meat again. You know how Texas cattle can travel, equal to any horse. I also have plenty of salt, so my command will not suffer.

General Sheridan has been in on my bed talking over our plans. He said again, for the fiftieth time, that I could go east at the earliest possible moment; but I tell him, as I always have, that I would not go till the work was all done.

Last night, a few moments after I had laid away my unfinished letter and writing materials, and was sitting alone in my Sibley tent, I heard the clatter of several feet coming, as if horsemen were approaching. It was bright moonlight, and I stood peering out of a small opening in the tent trying to divine who it could be entering camp at that hour of the night.

Three muffled figures, human in shape, mounted upon mules and leading two pack-mules, rode up to my tent and dismounted. I could not recognize them, but said, Come in, who is it? Why, general, we have the mail, was the reply. Hurrah! is that you, Jack?

(Jack Corbin, one of my most reliable scouts, whom I sent to Camp Supply a month ago.)

If they had been my brothers I could not have greeted them more warmly. Shaking hands all around and asking them to sit down by my sheet-iron stove and warm (we are having a terrible norther), I called the adjutant to distribute the mail they brought. Why was I so glad to see these daring men?not purely for themselves, though they are good, very good men, but a bird whispered in my ear that there were letters for me. I could have hugged them when I thought that they had braved the perils of two hundred miles, through the Indian country, in order to bring to us, 'way out here, news from our loved ones.

I was right in thinking I had letters in the bag. There were eight. The last was dated the 12th of February, and I received it in ten days from date. Is that not remarkable time for courier mail? It has made the quickest time that any document, official or private, has reached this command. Nothing seems to be a sufficient obstacle to prevent our letters coming. It often happens that General Sheridan desires to send off couriers post-haste with important despatches and cannot burden him with mail matter, so no one is informed of his going; but he never fails to quietly notify me, so that I can get a letter to you by every opportunity.

MEDICINE BLUFF CREEK, March 1, 1869.

This is the last day of our sojourn here. In fact, it was to have been the day of our departure, but the Quartermaster and Commissary departments have disappointed us, and I am forced to wait another day for supplies. My command has been living on quarter rations of bread for ten days. General Sheridan has been worried almost to distraction by this cause. He went away with the impression, from what he heard, that we were going to have a large and heavily loaded train. I have received advance lists of all they contain, and I can barely get ten days' rations of bread for my command, and about fifteen rations of other articles.

The troops remaining here have scarcely any commissary stores, but they cannot starve, though compelled to live on beef alone: but even then they will have no salt. I wish some of those who are responsible for this state of affairs, and who are living in luxury and comfort, could be made to share at least the discomforts and privations of troops serving in the field.

I am going to march over a portion of the country to which every one is a stranger, and the distance unknown. I wrote you, however, our proposed movements. I shall be glad to get on the move again. I have remained in camp until I am tired of it. I seldom care to stay in one camp over two or three days. I am almost as nomadic in my proclivities as the Indians themselves.

I send you a likeness which it may not occur to you is the picture of your husband. How do you like the beard? The costume is a very fine one, made of dressed buckskin and fringed. The cap is the one without a visor, that I have worn all winter. Frank, the tailor, is the maker of the suit.4 One of the officers said that he thought you would not recognize it, but would think that it was the man from California, the great hunter, who gave the President the bear-skin chair.

You would not imagine that I was writing amid frequent interruptions. The officers are constantly coming in inquiring about preparations for the march. Several Indian chiefs have been in to talk to them I talk, and continue my writing at the same time, an interpreter being present. I send you a likeness of four of my scouts. The one on the right is California Joe, mentioned in General Sheridan's and my despatches. He is the odd genius, so full of originality, and constantly giving utterance to quaint remarks. He has been everywhere west of the Mississippi, clear to the Pacific coast. He has not seen any of his relations for fifteen years, and when asked the other day why he never visited home, replied, Oh, to tell the truth, gineral, our family never was very peart for caring much about each other.

The third scout in the group is my interpreter, a young Mexican. Do you notice his long matted hair? Barnum would make a fortune if he had him. His hair never made the acquaintance of a comb, and his face is almost equally unacquainted with water. Yet he is a very good and deserving person, in his way. We have a great deal of sport with him. I threaten to put kerosene oil on his hair and set it on fire. He speaks several of the Indian languages, and is very useful. The fourth in the group is Jack Corbin, one of my most reliable scouts and couriers. He has made frequent trips to Camp Supply and back with the mail.

WASHITA BATTLE-GROUND, March 24, 1869.

We arrived here yesterday, having marched three hundred and fourteen miles. I will rest two days and then start with my entire command for Camp Supply.

I have been successful in my campaign against the Cheyennes. I outmarched them, outwitted them at their own game, proved to them they were in my power, and could and would have annihilated the entire village of over two hundred lodges but for two reasons. 1st. I desired to obtain the release of the two white women held captive by them, which I could not have done had I attacked. 2d. If I had attacked them, those who escaped, and absent portions of the tribe also, would have been on the war-path all summer, and we would have obtained no rest. These reasons alone influenced me to pursue the course I have, and now, when I can review the whole matter coolly, my better judgment and my humanity tell me I have acted wisely. You cannot appreciate how delicately I was situated. I counselled with no one, but when we overtook the Cheyenne village, and saw it in our power to annihilate them, my command, from highest to lowest, desired bloodshed. They were eager for revenge, and could not comprehend my conduct. They disapproved and criticised it. I paid no heed, but followed the dictates of my own judgment—the judgment upon which my beloved commander (General Sheridan) said he relied for the attainment of the best results. He had authorized me to do as I pleased, fight or not. And now my most bitter enemies cannot say that I am either blood-thirsty or possessed of an unworthy ambition.

Had I given the signal to attack, officers and men would have hailed it with a shout of gratification. I braved their opinion, and acted in opposition to their wishes, but to-day not one but says I was right, and any other course would have been disastrous. Many have come to me and confessed their error. The two women are bright, cultivated, and good-looking.

I now have the Cheyenne chiefs prisoners, and intend to hold them as such until their tribe comes in. I think we have rendered them sick and tired of war. We are delighted to find a large mail here. The paymaster is at Camp Supply waiting to pay the troops. One-half the command is dismounted, and what few horses we have could not go out again for two months.

General Custer refers in the letters written to me, from which quotations have just been made, to the rescue of the two white women. It was brought about after unending parleyings, delays, and excuses on the part of the Indians, by threatening to hang the three chiefs, Big Head, Fat Bear, and Dull Knife, who had been captured by our people with a view to holding them until all the white captives then with the hostiles were released. Indian messengers were sent to the tribe to report the danger to their chiefs, and finally, after long and weary watching of the hills over which the detachment from the village must come, a group of horsemen appeared. While they traversed several miles that separated them from our troops, the whole command watched with breathless interest. The young brother of a captured woman had been with the command all winter, and moving daily among our men, had kept their sympathies alive to the atrocity that had been perpetrated. All the troopers were watching this half-grown man, suddenly matured by anxiety and trouble, as he kept his eyes on the approaching Indians. The hearts of the soldiers beat faster and faster as the lad grew paler and more anxious. "The bravest are the tenderest", and that day proved it, for our rough men had scarcely any thought but for the suffering youth among them. Finally the Indians came near enough for an officer to perceive with his glass that there were two on one pony. A little nearer and they reported that they were women. The poor boy had no reason to be sure that one of them was his sister. To the Indian his captive is nameless. The chiefs had confessed that they had two white squaws, but by no means in their power could our people ascertain who they were. Finally the two figures descended from the pony, left the Indians, who were at a halt, and began to walk towards the waiting troops.

General Custer, by the aid of his powerful field-glass, told young Brewster that one of the figures coming was short and stout, the other taller. As soon as any observation was made by General Custer regarding what his glass revealed, one listening soldier told it to another, and a tremor of excitement spread from one end of the long watching line to the other. As Brewster looked through the glass lent to him and saw the women, he began to believe that one of them was his sister, as she was of about her height, and he implored General Custer for permission to go to her. It was hard to refuse, but he was obliged to do so, fearing the boy's horror at the change in her would make him forget the necessity for caution, and attempt revenge before the prisoners had really reached our lines.

The regiment of Kansas Volunteers had been organized to revenge some of the outrages to the border people, and with the hope of rescuing white prisoners, so General Custer gave them the privilege of first greeting their two States women. Three ranking officers went forward to meet the poor creatures, who, even then, except for their white skin, could hardly be distinguished from the Indians, so strange was their dress. Hardly had the officers advanced a quarter of the way when the waiting lad darted from his place beside General Custer, and sped on before every one until he had reached the women. As he clasped the taller of the two in his arms the soldiers knew that the sister for whom he had suffered so much was restored to him. The officers, in telling this story to us afterwards, always hurried over this part; they could not speak calmly.

They all crowded round the poor girls, eager to shake their hands and welcome them; but the most daring, the most valiant among them, did not attempt to conceal the tears that rolled down their cheeks. Men who had laid the fair flower of chivalry, the loved comrade, Captain Hamilton, in the ground only so recently with tearless silence, now wept over the two captives. The longer they looked upon the poor creatures the harder it became to control their emotions. The young faces of the two, who not a year before were bright, happy women, were now worn with privation and exposure, and haggard with the terrible insults of their captors, too dreadful to be chronicled here. The rudely cut and scanty garment that barely covered them was made from flour sacks bearing the brand that our government purchases, thus proving that the Indians who captured them had been drawing rations from the United States Indian agency at the time. They had Indian leggings and moccasins, their braided hair and arms encircled with spiral wire, their fingers covered with brass rings, their necks with beads, were evidences that the Indians, by thus adorning their prisoners, hoped to mollify the wrath of the white man. Fortunately, the one woman on the expedition, who was General Custer's cook, and from whose temper, as I have elsewhere related, her soldier husband so often suffered, now forgot the rages and furies of her daily life, and gave the poor released creatures some of her clothing, clad in which they left in charge of the now happy brother for their homes when the first wagon-train coming with supplies went back to Camp Supply.

The story of their life among the Indians was one of barbarous treatment and brutality; one had no knowledge that the other was a prisoner, as they had been captured separately, until they met in an Indian village, and after being traded about from one chief to another, they at last came to be owned by the same warrior. While together, they planned an escape. They did not know where they were, but stole out at night, and, guided by the stars, started north. With great joy they at last reached a wagon-road lately travelled. In the midst of this delight a bullet whistled by them, and soon they saw their owner in hot pursuit. New insults were inflicted, and more laborious work was loaded on the two after their return to the village. The conduct of the squaws, always jealous of white women, was brutality itself. The chief finally sold the two apart. With the terrible physical labor required of them, in addition to revolting indignities, it was a wonder they lived. They were almost starved, some days only being allowed a morsel of mule-meat, not over an inch square at most, for an entire day. The squaws beat them with clubs when the Indians were absent, and once one of them was felled to the ground by a blow from these same jealous fiends.

After all this dreadful life, it would seem as if the two women might have looked for immunity from future trouble, but in one instance it was not to be. Two years after their rescue, two of our officers were riding past a ranch and saw a little Indian boy playing before the house. Seeing him, they were too much interested not to inquire who lived there, and found, when the woman of the house came to the door, that it was one of the captives, whose face, owing to the tragic circumstances of the release, was fixed indelibly on their memory. It was impossible for her to resist detaining them a few moments, recalling again her gratitude to the troops for her rescue. When they asked if all went well with her, she could not help confiding to them the fact that the husband whom she had married after her return, instead of trying to make her forget the misery through which she had passed, often recalled all her year of captivity with bitterness, and was disposed to upbraid her, as if she had been in the least responsible for the smallest of her misfortunes.

In the many letters which I have looked over to obtain my few notes of a winter that was so eventful, I have found only occasional allusions to the hardships undergone; but, little by little, references were made after the return of the command that gave some idea of the self-denial and self-control which every one had to exercise. If afterwards any one exhibited the slightest sign of obstinacy, some teasing voice was sure to pipe up and say, "What can you expect of a man who has dined on mule-steaks?" General Custer could not eat mule or horse when they were all reduced to that desperate strait, but in his hunger he told me he used to think that he might, to save himself from starvation, make up his mind to eat his dogs' ears; and as they trotted along in front of him, quite happy over their mule breakfast, he looked longingly at these devoted friends, but with a hope that he might be spared the necessity of mutilating them.

The soldiers bartered for everything. One came to General Custer to beg to trade some tobacco for a loaf of bread. He received the half of the last loaf, but the tobacco was declined, as it was not the habit of General Custer to use it. That night the remaining half of the loaf was stolen. A little sack of oats was carefully treasured in General Custer's tent for his favorite horse, and the hungry animals left loose to pick what grass they could under the edges of the snow, came at night sniffing and snorting around the oats in hungry search. The horses grew so expert in foraging for themselves that they learned to put one hoof on a fallen sapling and tear off the bark with their teeth, as a dog holds and picks a bone.

It was on that campaign that I first heard of a sack made of a buffalo-skin to sleep in, and not even then should I have learned that such an invention was known, had not the handsome Adonis who used this clever device been unmercifully teased for indulging in so much luxury.

Indeed, it was mostly owing to the tormenting spirit of raillery, that is the characteristic of officer and soldier, that many of the hardships endured came to my knowledge at all. When the attention of a group was called to some comical situation, reminding the bystanders of some desperate plight, either of danger or deprivation, in which an officer had been placed, I had an insight into what had been endured by them all.

I suppose that I never should have heard of several incidents of the winter, had it not been that the Kansas Volunteers afforded some amusement to our men, from the fact that they, though brave men, were inexperienced campaigners, and their complaints did not escape our men, who considered themselves scarred veterans in comparison. For years, if any one said, talking of a hoped-for leave of absence, or describing some one who was lonely, I can see home just as plain, I knew that it referred to a volunteer who was heard by some of our men crying with homesickness, and confiding his woes to his bunkey. At heart our men were sorry for them, as there were some pitiful instances of nostalgia among them; but when they whined like children they were apt to encounter ridicule.

At the time when the supplies were getting low and half-rations were issued, and still the expedition pursued a fresh trail, instead of returning to the wagon train, the commanding officer ordered the band to play the regimental tunes, Garryowen, The Girl I left behind Me, etc., after camp was reached, in the hope of raising the spirits of the men. Evidently the soul of the Kansas Volunteers was not attuned to music when assailed by the pangs of hunger, for they were overheard to grumble and complain that Custer fed them on one hardtack a day and the Arkansaw Traveller.

The story of the military part of the rest of the winter, unmarked by any battle, but full of parleyings, ruses, subterfuges, councils, and promises of peace on the part of the Indians, who eventfully did come to terms, has been much better told by another pen than mine. I needed only to outline the battle of the Washita, that I might introduce the prisoners who formed such a feature of our life during the following summer at Fort Hays, and explain how it came to pass that the regiment was able to have a permanent camp instead of being all off on a campaign at once.

4. The morning that this letter came, enclosing the little tintype of General Custer with a full beard and a buckskin costume, I had a visit from the tailor's wife, to whom I have referred in Boots and Saddles as old Trouble agin, because it was the preface to all her speeches to me. She entered with an open letter and a tintype of the soldier husband whom after every beating she loved more fondly. He was dressed precisely as the general was, as I discovered from the picture that came in my letter later in the day. This mystified me for a time, but I found, after General Custer's return, that Frank, not explaining the exact reason, had borrowed the buckskin suit, hurried to have himself tintyped as the Great North American Scout, and sent off his letter to show Mrs. Frank what a smart soldier she had for a spouse.