This letter, which is dated Edith, Coke County, Texas; June 16, 1891, was furnished me for publication by Dr. T. E. Oertel. I am informed that the writer has since died.—C. T. B. Footnote 55: These figures, which are evidently from memory, are certainly in error.—C. T. B. Part II The War With the Sioux CHAPTER ONE With Crook’s Advance I. The Cause of the Fighting Late in 1876 the government determined that thereafter all Indians in the Northwest must live on the reservations. For a long time the Interior Department, to which the management of Indian affairs was committed, had been trying in vain by peaceable means to induce them to do this. The Indians were at last definitely informed that if they did not come into the reservation by the first of January, 1876, and stay there, the task of compelling them to do so would be turned over to the War Department. They did not come in; on the contrary, many of those on the reservations left them for the field; and thus the war began. The principal adviser and most influential head man among the Sioux Nation and its allied tribe, the Cheyennes, was Sitting Bull,[56] an Unkpapa chief and a great medicine man. He does not seem to have been much of a fighter. The Indians said he had a big head but a little heart, and they esteemed him something of a coward; in spite of this, his influence over the chiefs and the Indians was paramount, and remained so until his death. Perhaps he lacked the physical courage which is necessary in fighting, but he must have had abundant moral courage, for he was the most implacable enemy and the most dangerous—because of his ability, which was so great as to overcome the Indians’ contempt for his lack of personal courage—that the United States had ever had among the Indians. He was a strategist, a tactician—everything but a fighter. However, his lack of fighting qualities was not serious, for he gathered around him a dauntless array of war chiefs, the first among them being Crazy Horse, an Oglala, a skilful and indomitable, as well as a brave and ferocious, leader. The Sioux country was encircled by forts and agencies. The Missouri River inclosed it on the east and north. On the south were the military posts along the line of the Union Pacific Railroad. To the west were the mountains. Sitting Bull and his followers took position in the valleys of the Big Horn near the sources of the Powder River, right at the center of the encircling forts and agencies. It was a situation whence they could move directly upon the enemy in any direction as necessity required.