Reams have been written about his unfortunate campaign upon the Little Big Horn, in which he went down to such awful destruction, but little is known of some of the exploits of his early career on the plains. After the war, more fortunate than most of the younger general officers who were forced to content themselves with captaincies or less, General Custer was appointed Lieutenant-Colonel of the new Seventh Regular Cavalry, a regiment which was born with him, lived with him, and a large part of which died with him. The officers of the regiment were a set of unusual men. Custer himself was allowed considerable voice in the selection of them, and such a body of officers had been rarely assembled in one command. Most of the troopers were not at first of the high grade to which they afterward attained. The best men, in the ranks at least, at the close of the Civil War, had had enough of fighting. They wanted to get back to civil life once more. Not frequently it was only the inferior soldiers who could be induced to re-enlist from the volunteer into the regular regiments which were being organized or reorganized. There were in the ranks, however, a leaven of veterans who were soldiers from love as well as from habit. With these as a nucleus, Custer and his officers, by a judicious weeding out and a rigorous course of discipline, soon gathered a body of troopers than which there were none finer in the service of the United States, nor, in fact, in any other service. Owing to the fact that the colonel, a distinguished general officer in the war, was on detached service commanding a department, the regiment was practically continuously under the command of Custer until his death in 1876. The duty that devolved upon it was the protection of the settlers in Kansas. The job was no sinecure. In the last half of the year 1868 statistics, which do not pretend to be comprehensive, for they are only facts reported officially to the headquarters of the Department of the Missouri, show one hundred and fifty-seven people killed, fifty-seven wounded, including forty-one scalped, fourteen women outraged and murdered, one man, four women and twenty-four children taken into captivity, one thousand six hundred and twenty-seven horses, mules and cattle stolen, twenty-four ranches or settlements destroyed, eleven stage coaches attacked, and four wagon trains annihilated. This with a total loss to the Indians of eleven killed and one wounded. Truly there was a reign of blood upon that frontier. Every man murdered was also frightfully and disgustingly mutilated. This record takes no account of soldiers who were killed.