The army woman’s knowledge of the peril in the usual border warfare was not an imaginary one, either. As we may read in letters and books written by army wives, it was brought home to them directly again and again. After every campaign poor, wretched women of stranded and robbed emigrant trains or devastated settlements were brought into the various camps, to whom these army women ministered with loving care, and from whom they heard frightful and sickening details that froze the blood; yet the army wife herself never faltered in her devotion, never failed in her willingness to follow wherever her husband was sent. And, save for the actual campaigning in the field, the army wife was everywhere—sometimes there, too. In this particular expedition there were several little children, from some of whom I have gleaned details and happenings. One of these lads, while at Fort Kearney before the march, became so expert with the bow and arrow in target shooting with young Pawnee Indians near the fort, that he challenged General Sherman to shoot over the flagstaff. The youngster accomplished it by lying upon his back with feet braced against the bow, and the general squarely withdrew from the contest, declining to follow the boy’s ingenious artifice. The march was necessarily a slow one and the distance great—some six hundred miles—so that it was not until the twenty-eighth of June they reached Fort Reno. There they were menaced by the Indians for the first time and every endeavor was made to stampede their herds. The officers and men were fast becoming undeceived as to the character of their expedition. To abandon Fort Reno, or to remove it, was not practicable. Carrington ordered it re-stockaded and put in thorough repair, garrisoned it from his command, and with the balance, something over five hundred, advanced farther into the unknown land on the 9th of July. On the 13th of July, 1866, he established his camp on the banks of the Big Piney Creek, an affluent of the Powder River, about four miles from the superb Big Horn Range, with snow-capped Cloud Peak towering nine thousand feet into the heavens, close at hand. A few days later, on a little, flower-decked, grass-covered plateau, bare of trees, which fortunately happened to be just the size to contain the fort he proposed to erect, and which sloped abruptly away in every direction, forming a natural glacis, he began building the stockade. III. The Outpost of Civilization