Before Carpenter's approaching cavalry the Indians fled for their lives, and they who a few hours hence would have been swinging bloody tomahawks above our heads were now scurrying to their hiding-places far away.
[Illustration: Like the passing of a hurricane, horses, mules, men, all dashed toward the place]
Never tenderer hands cared for the wounded, and never were bath and bandage and food and drink more welcome. Our command was shifted to a clean spot where no stench of putrid flesh could reach us. Rest and care, such as a camp on the Plains can offer, was ours luxuriously; and hardtack and coffee, food for the angels, we had that day, to our intense satisfaction. Life was ours once more, and hope, and home, and civilization. Oh, could it be true, we asked ourselves, so long had we stood face to face with Death.
The import of this struggle on the Arickaree was far greater than we dreamed of then. We had gone out to meet a few foemen. What we really had to battle with was the fighting strength of the northern Cheyenne and Sioux tribes. Long afterwards it came to us what this victory meant. The broad trail we had eagerly followed up the Arickaree fork of the Republican River had been made by bands on bands of Plains Indians mobilizing only a little to the westward, gathering for a deadly purpose. At the full of the moon the whole fighting force, two thousand strong, was to make a terrible raid, spreading out on either side of the Republican River, reaching southward as far as the Saline Valley and northward to the Platte, and pushing eastward till the older settlements turned them back. They were determined to leave nothing behind them but death and desolation. Their numbers and leadership, with the defenceless condition of the Plains settlers, give broad suggestion of what that raid would have done for Kansas. Our victory on the Arickaree broke up that combination of Indian forces, for all future time. It was for such an unknown purpose, and against such unguessed odds, that fifty of us led by the God of all battle lines, had gone out to fight. We had met and vanquished a foe two hundred times our number, aye, crippled its power for all future years. We were lifting the fetters from the frontier; we were planting the standards westward, westward. In the history of the Plains warfare this fight on the Arickaree, though not the last stroke, was one of the decisive struggles in breaking the savage sovereignty, a sovereignty whose wilderness demesne to-day is a land of fruit and meadow and waving grain, of peaceful homes and wealth and honor.