uprisings and pleas into massacres until alike good and bad have fallen beneath their vengeance, the army has been kept on the alert and the red-man himself, always defeated, is becoming more and more a dependent and a serf.

From the Apache and Cheyenne troubles of 1863 and '64 until the successful policy of General Crook in 1883, the twenty years of frontier trouble have been full of peril, of

action and of blood.

The Indian policy of the Government has been fickle, illiberal, faithless and bad, the moral influence of the soldiers upon the red-men has been of the worst character, the military rule to which they have been subjected has been autocratic, tyrannical and full of harm, and the Indian wars of the United States have been, largely, of the nation's own making.

But, as has before been shown, the causes of a war do not always govern the character of the fighters in that war and the bravery of the American soldier in his encounters with the "hostiles" of the mountains and the plains has been above criticism, positive and obstinate. Shirland and his California volunteers, the captors of Mangas Colorado the Apache; Chivington and his avengers at the camp of Black Kettle the Cheyenne; Fetterman and his eighty-four regulars making their last tragic stand against two thousand Northern Indians on Lodge Trail Ridge; Powell and his thirty men at bay, but finally defeating with terrible loss Red Cloud and his twentyfive hundred Sioux; Miles and his brave four hundred in the Wolf Mountains; the half-dozen cavalrymen of the gallant Sixth, holding their ground for thirty-six hours against a force of splendidly-mounted Kiowas and Comanches, twenty-five to one; Crook and his plucky New Mexican riders wherever the bugle has sounded "boots and saddle!" the Indian fighter

who wears the blue has proved his right to the name of fighter indeed.

But, in all the sad and sorry story of Indian atrocity and American treachery, of Indian bravery and American valor there is no paragraph more starting. more bloody or more dramatic than is that which tells of the last gallant stand of Custer and his men- the Battle of Little Big Horn.

It is the climax of all Indian warfare from the days of Philip of Pokancket to those of Sitting Bull the Sioux and Geronimo the Apache, and is all the more absorbing because of the mystery that shrouds it and its hints at desperate valor which, alas! no man of all that brave four hundred lives to prove or disprove.

General George Armstrong Custer of the Seventh U. S. Cavalry was, in many respects. America's beau sabreur. The choice of McClellan and the favorite of Sheridan, he was the idei of his own hard-riders and the envy of his Indian foemen. His very appearance was striking and picturesque as, in his broad cavalier's hat, his gold-bedizened jacket and high cavalry boots, with his long yellow hair flying in the wind he would ride like a tornado against rebel cavalry or Indian warrior—a subject worthy Vandyke's pencil, the very type of the dashing trooper of romance.

The war over, he was assigned to duty on the plains and became the most daring and most successful of the Indian fighters of 1870. On the fifteenth of May, 1876, Custer was ordered to lead his regiment, the Seventh Cavalry, as the advance of a joint expedition against the hostile Sioux. On morning of the twenty-fifth of June, with five companies of mand amounting to not over four hundred men, he fell everly-arranged ambuscade of the confederated Sioux

backed by a force of at least three thousand Indian warriors. A desperate fight ensued. Valiantly holding his ground, vainly looking for the help that came not, stubbornly at bay but calm, cool and courageous to the last Custer fell fighting and his devoted soldiers to a man fell, also fighting, around the body of their chief.

Blinded by a savage ruse, himself the victim of political wiles that had stirred up his fighting blood and driven him to a determination to "make his mark" once more, Custer's unguarded advance and reckless charge were, perhaps, unwise generalship, but they were the chief ingredients of heroism and a dauntless courage and as such have given him an immortality that will ever make him the typical Indian fighter of the nineteenth century. Much is forgiven to valor; a brave man's death covers all mistakes.

Of other instances of soldierly courage in the Indian fights that have become a part of American history since 1865, there are many on record. There is always a fascination to us around the stories of life "among the red-skins," and, ignoring always the Indian's side of the question, we listen with quickened pulse and brightening eyes to the account of how Clark and his fortyeight men held over seven hundred "hostiles" at bay for fully three hours of battle; how Sergeant Taylor at the risk of his life rescued his lieutenant (now Captain Charles King, the soldier-novelist) from Apache arrows, supporting his wounded. officer with one arm and with the other managing his deadly carbine; how private John Nihill acted as a "flanker" to his eight comrades of the Fifth Cavalry in the heart of the Whitestone mountains and held forty Indians at bay so that his brother-soldiers could escape from the ambush; how Amos Chapman, the scout of the Third Cavalry, leaped across the

body of his fallen comrade and held off the circling Comanches until he could "shoulder " the wounded man and bear him out of the death-trap into which he had fallen; how private William Evans, of the Seventh Infantry, at the imminent risk of his life carried dispatches for General Crook through a country inhab ited by hostile Sioux, dodging death all the way; how Sergeant William Lewis of the Third Cavalry won a medal from Congress for volunteering to discover the whereabouts of Little Wolf and his Cheyenne warriors - all these we hear with pride as we do the countless other tales of risk and daring, of dash and valor that illumine the otherwise dull details of army life on the plains and make vivid finger-marks on the annals of Indian warfare.

And that later element in American military life — the black soldier, what of him? Admitted to citizenship the negro has also been raised to equality, and his service as a soldier dates from Fort Wagner and its bloody assault. They are now faithful soldiers in the Regular army. Certain regiments, as for instance the Tenth United States Cavalry, are composed of negro soldiers and have seen active service on the plains. Will they fight? That question, says Mr. Remington, "is easily answered. They have fought many, many times. The old sergeant sitting near me, as calm of feature as a bronze statue, once deliberately walked over a Cheyenne rifle-pit and killed his man. One little fellow near him once took charge of a lot of stampeded cavalry-horses when Apache bullets were flying loose and no one knew from what point to expect them next. These little episodes prove the sometimes doubted self-reliance of the negro."

Equally savage with the wild warriors of the plains, the “wolfreared children" of Eastern civilization have now and again

proved the need of the restraining arm of power. The same brutal element that in the New York draft riots of 1863, terrorized a great city until the veterans from the front could

master and quell them, has, since the war-days, on two or three occasions sprung with snarl and growl at the throat of society and sought to strangle where it could not rule.