A Sportsman 163 



ing them. The Sioux Indians, although they had been 

 secured upon a northern reservation and were at com- 

 pelled peace with the whites, had been permitted by 

 the government to come upon the buffalo grounds to 

 secure their customary and usual supplies of dried 

 meat for the coming winter. 



Only a year before the Sioux, with the Chey- 

 ennes, the Ogalallas, and half a dozen other tribes, 

 who had banded together to prevent the building of 

 the Kansas Pacific Railroad, and who, in 1867 an( i 

 1868, swept away the habitations of the settlers and 

 ruthlessly murdered men, women, and children indis- 

 criminately, had been overcome by the government 

 forces under Generals Sheridan, Custer, Sully, and For- 

 syth, and been placed upon reservations, or at least all 

 who could be gathered up, although remnants of the 

 warlike bands were still loose for moderate forays. 

 The various tribes, still smarting under the igno- 

 miny of their defeat and feeling an irritation difficult to 

 entirely conceal, were only restrained by fear of speedy 

 punishment in case of transgression. 



We had not known of the government permit for 

 the Indians to be let loose after the buffalo, or we 

 should not have taken this route. We experienced 

 an anxiety difficult to restrain, and as the straggling 

 groups of Indians came anywhere near us, attracted 

 by our train stalled at the face of a snow-filled cut, 

 we prepared for a possible attack. There were but a 

 handful, a dozen or so of passengers, but all men, and 

 with half a dozen shovellers and the engineer, fireman, 

 and brakemen we could muster a score. We had 

 plenty of arms and ammunition, as each train sent out 

 was well equipped by the company, which had fought 



