The tails of his overcoat had worked outside and were pinned fast to the wagon box by four arrows. He could not use his right arm, either. The steady threshing with the whip had almost paralyzed it.
He was helped into the surgeon's office. His right hand was badly torn, and the wound in his back serious. Captain Booth watched the wounds being dressed; didn't feel very comfortable, himself, somehow.
"What makes you shrug your shoulders so, captain?"
"I don't know. There's a curious smarting."
"I should say there was! Why, you're wearing an arrow-head, man!"
So he was. When he had wrenched free from the wagon-sheet cover he had taken an arrow-head with him. It had to be cut out.
They both got well. Twenty-two arrows were found in the wagon box; the whole vehicle was a sight! As for the plucky little mules, they never amounted to much for service, after that, but they managed to hobble around in their pasture and enjoy their reward as veterans, on a pension of the best grass and water.
The Plains Indians--the Sioux, the Cheyennes, the Arapahos, the Kiowas, the Comanches--had fought hard, during the war of the white men in the East, to clear their hunting grounds; but when in 1866 the Civil War had ended they found that the Americans were pressing forward more strongly than ever.
Two iron roads were being surveyed through the buffalo country; new gold fields, in Montana, were being opened and a white man's wagon-road, protected by forts, was being laid out to reach them by a short cut through Wyoming.
With two thousand of his Oglala Sioux, Chief Red Cloud undertook to close this wagon-road; and close it he did. He beleaguered new Fort Phil Kearney in northern Wyoming, wiped out one detachment of eighty-one men, attacked other detachments, cut off the supplies from all the forts, stood firmly in the path; and in 1868 the United States Government agreed to withdraw all soldiers and leave the country to the Sioux.[1]
But the iron trails continued. There were the Union Pacific in the north, the Kansas Pacific on the south. The first drove its stakes and laid its rails along the great white wagon-road of the Oregon Trail and the Overland Trail, which already had split the buffalo herds. The Sioux and the Northern Cheyennes fought it in Nebraska, they fought it in Wyoming; until in 1868 it still had not been stopped, it was lunging on straight for the mountains, and in the treaty that promised him the hunting grounds north of it Chief Red Cloud also promised to let it alone.