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The feeling between the regular troops and the frontiersmen was often very bitter, and on several occasions violent brawls resulted. One such occurred at Limestone, where the brutal Indian-fighter Wetzel lived. Wetzel had murdered a friendly Indian, and the soldiers bore him a grudge. When they were sent to arrest him the townspeople sallied to his support.
"The Allens are dreadful mad about their cattle," remarked Tom. "The old man tracked them to a ravine in the woods, and found that his oxen had been killed and dressed: the horns and hide lay on the ground, and the blood was scarcely cold, but not an Indian was to be seen. He couldn't even find a trail, and he's an old Indian-fighter, you know." "Have any Indians been seen near here, since?"
Coming to the Rocky Mountains in 1836 in the employ of the American Fur Company, he has since served as hunter, trapper, Indian-fighter, guide to several United States exploring expeditions, and spy in the Mexican war as well as in the war of the rebellion.
It was while in the capacity of scout at Fort Barker and Fort Hayes that Buffalo Bill added to his fame as an Indian-fighter, scout and guide, for almost daily he met with thrilling adventures, while his knowledge of the country enabled him to guide commands from post to post with the greatest of ease and without following a trail, but by taking a straight course across prairie or hill-land.
"They be about the greenest set!" said an old Indian-fighter to whom this subject was broached, "and the sight of an Injun jest about scares 'em to death at first. I never saw any of 'em I was afraid of if I only had any sort of a show. Why, back in '59 I undertook to take a young man back to the States, and we started off in a buggy a buggy, do you mind.
Such was the equipment of this ancient Indian-fighter, whose exploits date eleven years before the landing of the Puritans at Plymouth, and sixty-six years before King Philip's War. Each of the three Frenchmen was in a separate canoe, and, as it grew light, they kept themselves hidden, either by lying at the bottom, or covering themselves with an Indian robe.
While the half-savage civilization of the farther West was roaring on its way across the continent while the day of the keelboatman and the plainsman, of the Indian-fighter and the miner, even the day of the cowboy, was dawning and setting there still was a frontier left far behind in the East, near the top of the mountain range which made the first great barrier across our pathway to the West.
Did not the th worship him to a man? Was not Indian fighting the most trying, hazardous, terrible of all warfares, and was not Jack pre-eminent as an Indian-fighter? Was there not a deep scar on his breast that would have been deeper and redder but for her little filmy handkerchief that stopped the cruel arrow just in time?
It was certainly a small body of men, but nearly every one of them was an experienced hunter, guide, scout and Indian-fighter, and they could fight the red-skins in their own way. In four days they were prepared to take the field, and on the morning of the 29th of August, 1868, they rode out of Fort Hays to meet the Indians.
We had to do our own fightin' then, you'll agree, Hiram." "Why, Major Gilcrest," Dudley exclaimed, "were you an Indian-fighter? I thought you were a Revolutionary soldier." "So I was," Gilcrest answered, "from the battle of Lexington until badly wounded in Virginia by Arnold's raiders in the spring of '81. Then, early in the next year I came to Kentucky." "You surprise me," Abner replied.
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