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Updated: May 21, 2025
It is only the human organism backed by a soul, that can suffer and endure. Pliley and his fifty men who had left us the night we went into camp on Sand Creek had reached Sheridan three days in advance of us, and already relief was on its way to those whom we had left beyond the snow-beleaguered canyons of the Cimarron.
Our commander, Colonel Moore, always brave and able; and our captains, Henry Lindsay, and Edgar Barker, and George Jenness, and David Payne, with the shrewd, courageous scout, Allison Pliley, and the undaunted, clear-thinking, young lieutenant, Frank Stahl.
Oh, I could look death calmly between the eyes as I had watched it creeping toward me on the heated Plains of the Arickaree, and among the cold starved sand dunes of the Cimarron, but to be lauded as a hero here in Springvale the tears would come. Where were Custer, and Moore, and Forsyth, and Pliley, and Stillwell, and Morton, if such as I be called a hero?
Even the entrails cleansed in the snow and eaten raw gives hint of how hungry we were. At last in our dire extremity it was decided to choose five hundred of the strongest men and horses to start under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Horace L. Moore, without food or tents, through the snow toward the Beulah Land of Camp Supply. Pliley had been gone for three days.
And now my captain was the same Pliley, who with Donovan had made that hundred-mile dash to Fort Wallace to start a force to the rescue of our beleaguered few in that island citadel of sand.
I was only a private, and a private's business is not to question, but to obey. And that major over us, cashiered for cowardice later, was not a Kansas man. Thank heaven for that! A score of us, including my cousin and myself, under a sergeant, and with good Scout Pliley, were suddenly ordered back among the hills. "Where do we go, and why?" Beverly asked me as we rode along.
When the sun rose on the second day the hills about us swarmed with savages, whose demoniac yells rent the air. Leonidas had his back against a rock at old Thermopylae, but our Kansas plainsmen fought in a ring of fire. At day-dawn, our brave scout, Pliley, slipped away, and, after long hours among the barren hills, he found the main command.
The man who went out from the camp on Sand Creek that night was one of the two men I had seen rise up from the sand-pits of the Arickaree Island and start out in the blackness and the peril to carry our cry to Fort Wallace Pliley, whose name our State must sometime set large in her well-founded, well-written story.
Their names were Donovan and Pliley, recorded in the military roster as private scouts, but the titles they bear in the memory of every man who sat in that grim council on that night, has a grander sound than the written records declare. "Boys," Forsyth said, lifting himself on his elbow where he lay in his sand bed, "this is the last chance.
We only knew that we had no food; that one man, and all but four of our cavalry horses lay dead out in the valley; that two men in our midst were slowly dying, and a dozen others suffering from wounds of battle, among these our captain and Scout Pliley; that we were in a wild, strange land, with Indians perching, vulture-like, on every hill-top, waiting for dawn to come to seize their starving prey.
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