General Sheridan, who now
commanded the Department of the Missouri, believed that a general
war was imminent. He determined to teach the southern tribesmen a
lesson they would not forget. In the dead of winter our troops
marched against the Cheyennes, then in their encampments below
the Kansas line. The Indians did not believe that white men could
march in weather forty below zero, during which they themselves
sat in their tepees around their fires; but our cavalrymen did
march in such weather, and under conditions such as our cavalry
perhaps could not endure today. Among these troops was the
Seventh Cavalry, Custer's Regiment, formed after the Civil War,
and it was led by Lieutenant-Colonel George A. Custer himself,
that gallant officer whose name was to go into further and more
melancholy history of the Plains.
Custer marched until he got in touch with the trails of the
Cheyennes, whom he knew to belong to Black Kettle's band. He did
not at the time know that below them, in the same valley of the
Washita, were also the winter encampments of the Kiowas, the
Comanches, the Arapahoes, and even a few Apaches.
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