selves where gaunt starvation did not stare them in the face, but their uniforms were worn and tattered and their rags were poor barriers to keep out the cold, chilling winds that sweep this country in the fall, whilst future, for no generous, provident post was this to cover their bleeding, cactus-swollen feet. Up too this period, since leaving Omaha City, I had marched my command a distance of largely over 1,000 miles, through almost unknown and unexplored, encountering storms as fierce in their fury as the merciless savage who is alone fit to inhabit this almost sterile waste. Yet was the suffering of the command not at an end, for they must march to other posts ere their crying wants could be supplied. Here also to all intents and purposes ended the campaign of the right column of the so-called Powder River Indian Expedition. In its march it had traversed nearly or quite 1,200 miles through a country almost entirely unknown to white men, in part nothing better than a desert and barren waste away from the banks of the occasional streams that course through it toward the Missouri. Eighty-two days was this column struggling and fighting its away to this point, making its own roads through valleys and over mountains; encountering furious storms deadly in effect; finding and severely punishing a wary savage foe; the greater part of the time suffering the torments of starvation. Eighty-two days had they subsisted on sixty days' rations which had naturally lost 20 per cent. of their original proportion. The country passed over in the route traveled, being mostly a waste of "Bad Lands," is destitute of wild game, hence no addition from this source could be made to husband the rations whilst they run their natural course nor substituted for them when exhausted. No intermediate depots of supplies had been established on our route, without which no command can be successful in campaigning in this country against this kind of an enemy. Had my trains been burned with supplies of this nature at the starting they must have been destroyed at an early day in the campaign, owing to the nature of the expedition and the peculiar topography of this hitherto unknown country. On the 23rd General Connor arrived with his command. On the 25th I received to move on the following morning to Laramie. The first day out I marched but ten miles, when I encamped to await for a train of forty wagons which General Connor had ordered to report to me to transport my foot-sore men, of which I had some 400 or more. On the 4th of October I reached Fort Laramie, and camped a little below it, on Laramie River.

Whilst camped here an occurrence took place, passing strange, yet most true, which as an integral part of the closing history of the command must have full relation. Some thirty-six hours after reaching this post a fatigue to work on the earth-works being thrown up around the place. If the spirit that prompted the detail expected to feast its purposes through insubordination or rebellion it was egregiously disappointed. What a sight was here. Four hundred ragged, barefooted men, emaciated with fatigue and the dangers of a four months' campaign, who had met and worsted an enemy on three several occasions, marched up in the face of a garrison of 2,000 more well appointed idle troops to work as actors, while these idle troops played the audience. Nobly and without a murmur of discontent did these ragged, war-worn veterans respond to orders, carrying the lesson to the hearts of those who chose to view them that they had learned a soldier's first duty was to obey and could be as successful in this as they had