Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/277

 companies of the Ninth and Fourteenth Infantry to guard supply trains, was employed in furnishing the requisite protection to the geologists, and in obtaining such additional information in regard to the topography of the country, the best lines for wagon roads, and sites for such posts as might be necessary in the future. This was under the command of Colonel R. I. Dodge, of the Twenty-third Infantry, and made a very complete search over the whole of the hills, mapping the streams and the trend of the ranges, and opening up one of the most picturesque regions on the face of the globe.

It was never a matter of surprise to me that the Cheyennes, whose corn-fields were once upon the Belle Fourche, the stream which runs around the hills on the north side, should have become frenzied by the report that these lovely valleys were to be taken from them whether they would or no. In the summer of 1876 the Government sent a commission, of which Senator William B. Allison, of Iowa, was chairman, and the late Major-General Alfred H. Terry, a member, to negotiate with the Sioux for the cession of the Black Hills, but neither Sioux nor Cheyennes were in the humor to negotiate. There appeared to be a very large element among the Indians which would sooner have war than peace; all sorts of failures to observe previous agreements were brought up, and the advocates of peace were outnumbered. One day it looked very much as if a general mêlée was about to be precipitated. The hostile element, led by "Little Big Man," shrieked for war, and "Little Big Man" himself was haranguing his followers that that was as good a moment as any to begin shooting. The courage and coolness of two excellent officers, Egan and Crawford, the former of the Second, the latter of the Third Cavalry, kept the savages from getting too near the Commissioners: their commands formed line, and with carbines at an "advance" remained perfectly motionless, ready to charge in upon the Indians should the latter begin an attack. Egan has often told me that he was apprehensive lest the accidental discharge of a carbine or a rifle on one side or the other should precipitate a conflict in which much blood would surely be shed. Egan has been many years dead—worn out in service—and poor Crawford was killed by Mexican irregular troops at the moment that he had surprised and destroyed the village of the Chiricahua Apache chief "Geronimo," in the depths of the Sierra Madre,