In 1869 the head chief of the Otoes was Arkeketah who was said to have been appointed to that position by Major Daily. He was a polygamist and very much opposed to the ways of the white man. In fact he was such a reactionary and stumbling-block to the progress of the tribe that the writer finally deposed him and advanced Medicine Horse to the position of head chief. The number of Indians living within the borders of Gage county in 1869 was probably not far from eight hundred. The reservation, comprising two hundred and fifty square miles, extended some distance into Kansas and also took in a part of Jefferson county in this state, but the Indians were all domiciled in Gage county. Their principal village was situated close to the site now occupied by the town of Barnston and where a fine spring afforded an ample supply of water. The wigwams were of a type adopted by the Indians long before the discovery of America, and most of them were large enough to accommodate several families. It was a custom of the Otoes to vacate the wigwams and live during the winter in tipis which were pitched in the timber where fuel was close at hand. In 1869 only three persons in the confederated tribes wore citizens clothes, the rest were all blanket Indians, who, during warm weather, went almost naked, and habitually painted their faces and shaved heads, with vermillion and indigo. The principal burial place of the Otoes was on a bluff overlooking the river bottoms, and within a short distance of where Barnston now stands. For years it was visited, as one of the curiosities of the reservation, by the white settlers and strangers, chiefly on account of the weird and ghostly funeral oaks that stood on the brink of the bluff, bearing, lashed to their gnarled and crooked limbs, gruesome burdens of dead Indians, wrapped in bark and partly mummified by the sun and wind; there was probably a score of these interesting objects resting peacefully on the boughs of these three oaks; they had been there for many years, and might possibly have remained to this day had not a great prairie fire during the summer of 1871 destroyed the oaks and their ghastly burden, leaving only an assortment of charred bones and skulls to mark the site.