Forsyth had no
chance to get a command of troops, but he was allowed to enlist
fifty scouts, all "first-class, hardened frontiersmen," and with
this body of fighting men he carried out the most dramatic battle
perhaps ever waged on the Plains.
Forsyth ran into the trail of two or three large Indian villages,
but none the less he followed on until he came to the valley of
the South Fork. Here the Cheyennes under the redoubtable Roman
Nose surrounded him on the 17th of September. The small band of
scouts took refuge on a brushy island some sixty yards from
shore, and hastily dug themselves in under fire.
They stood at bay outnumbered ten to one, with small prospect of
escape, for the little island offered no protection of itself,
and was in pointblank range from the banks of the river. All
their horses soon were shot down, and the men lay in the rifle
pits with no hope of escape. Roman Nose, enraged at the
resistance put up by Forsyth's men, led a band of some four
hundred of his warriors in the most desperate charge that has
been recorded in all our Indian fighting annals. It was rarely
that the Indian would charge at all; but these tribesmen,
stripped naked for the encounter, and led at first by that giant
warrior, who came on shouting his defiance, charged in full view
not only once but three times in one day, and got within a
hundred feet of the foot of the island where the scouts were
lying.
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