Of Buffalo Bill’s adventures in these wars the plain record would only take one large volume, but he was scouting in company with Texas Jack, John Nelson, Belden, the White Chief, and so many other famous frontier heroes, each needing at least one book volume, that I must give the story up as a bad job. At the end of the Sioux campaign Buffalo Bill was chief of scouts with the rank of colonel. [Illustration: COLONEL CODY (“Buffalo Bill”)] In 1876, General Custer, with a force of nearly four hundred cavalry, perished in an attack on the Sioux, and the only survivor was his pet boy scout, Billy Jackson, who got away at night disguised as an Indian. Long afterward Billy, who was one of God’s own gentlemen, told me that story while we sat on a grassy hillside watching a great festival of the Blackfeet nation. After the battle in which Custer--the Sun Child--fell, the big Sioux army scattered, but a section of it was rounded up by a force under the guidance of Buffalo Bill. “One of the Indians,” he says, “who was handsomely decorated with all the ornaments usually worn by a war chief ... sang out to me ‘I know you, Prairie Chief; if you want to fight come ahead and fight me!’ “The chief was riding his horse back and forth in front of his men, as if to banter me, and I accepted the challenge. I galloped toward him for fifty yards and he advanced toward me about the same distance, both of us riding at full speed, and then when we were only about thirty yards apart I raised my rifle and fired. His horse fell to the ground, having been killed by my bullet. Almost at the same instant my horse went down, having stepped in a gopher-hole. The fall did not hurt me much, and I instantly sprang to my feet. The Indian had also recovered himself, and we were now both on foot, and not more than twenty paces apart. We fired at each other simultaneously. My usual luck did not desert me on this occasion, for his bullet missed me, while mine struck him in the breast. He reeled and fell, but before he had fairly touched the ground I was upon him, knife in hand, and had driven the keen-edged weapon to its hilt in his heart. Jerking his war-bonnet off, I scientifically scalped him in about five seconds.... “The Indians came charging down upon me from a hill in hopes of cutting me off. General Merritt ... ordered ... Company K to hurry to my rescue. The order came none too soon.... As the soldiers came up I swung the Indian chieftain’s topknot and bonnet in the air, and shouted: ‘The first scalp for Custer!’” Far up to the northward, Sitting Bull, with the war chief Spotted Tail and about three thousand warriors fled from the scene of the Custer massacre. And as they traveled on the lonely plains they came to a little fort with the gates closed. “Open your gates and hand out your grub,” said the Indians. “Come and get the grub,” answered the fort.