Colonel Nelson A. Miles of the Fifth United States Infantry was directed to march from Fort Dodge on the Arkansas River just below Dodge City in south-western Kansas, and strike the Indians in Texas. He took eight troops of the Sixth Cavalry, four companies of the Fifth Infantry, a section of artillery, twenty-five white scouts and a party of Delaware Indian scouts who were led by their gray-haired old chief, Fall Leaf. Three other army columns, one from Texas in the south, one from New Mexico in the southwest, one from Indian Territory in the northeast, also were starting from the same place: the Staked Plain region of western and northwestern Texas. Colonel Miles refitted at Camp Supply, one hundred miles south of Fort Dodge, and pushed on toward Adobe Walls. His advance of scouts and one troop of cavalry were just in time to help save Adobe Walls from yet another attack by Comanches and Kiowas. But the little garrison of buffalo-hunters were still full of fight, and the heads of the twelve Indians still grinned down from the pickets of the corral. The Indians fled southwest, for the Staked Plain. Colonel Miles pursued and had a brush or two. The marches were long and hard, through a very hot, dry country where the only water was bad. Soldiers suffered so from thirst that some of them opened veins in their own arms and sucked the blood. The Staked Plain country is a desert except after the rains or where irrigated by ditches. It forms a high flat table-land whose edges drop sharply off in curiously pillared cliffs. Therefore the early Spanish called it El Llano Estacado--the Palisaded Plain; but the Americans believed that the name was given because the only trails across it were marked by stakes. In later days it proved to be a vast range for cattle and horses; in the older days it was the stronghold of the Comanches, who knew every water-hole and every cave. Drawing near to the Staked Plain, southwest of Adobe Walls, Colonel Miles decided that he must have more supplies. The trains were far in the rear, and may have been cut off. On the afternoon of September 10 he directed that dispatches be sent back, for the trains or else for Camp Supply on the North Canadian River in northwestern Oklahoma which at that time was Indian Territory. The men selected were Sergeant Z. T. Woodall of I troop, Sixth Cavalry; Private John Harrington of H troop, Private Peter Roth of A troop, Private George W. Smith of M troop; and Citizen Scouts Amos Chapman and Billy Dixon--the same Billy Dixon of Adobe Walls. After the Quana Parker fight he had joined the army service. Scout Chapman had been stationed at Fort Sill, on the reservation in Indian Territory.