October wore away. Soon the Indians of the plains would be retiring into their villages, for the winter. They would eat dried buffalo meat and their horses would eat cottonwood bark and willows; and they would not expect to be interfered with. Then in the spring they would issue forth again, to ride hither-thither, three miles to the cavalry’s one. By the reports which Scout Buffalo Bill had brought up to Fort Hays from Fort Larned, the families of the Indians had been moving southward. Therefore General Sheridan believed that the main winter villages would be found down in the Indian Territory, toward Texas. This was a wild rugged country, where white men rarely penetrated. But the Cheyennes and the Kiowas and the Comanches knew it well. General Sully and Uncle John Smith, an old trader who had married into the Cheyennes, had located a good rendezvous place for the expedition, where, forming the North Canadian River, Wolf Creek and Beaver Creek joined, about one hundred miles south of Fort Dodge. With a huge supply train of four hundred wagons and with five companies of the Third Regular Infantry under Major John H. Page, the eleven companies of the Seventh arrived there, to wait for the Nineteenth Kansas Volunteer Cavalry. Governor Crawford of Kansas had resigned to be its colonel in the field; and General Sherman’s last dispatch had said that the regiment was on its way. The camp was named Camp Supply, because the supplies were to be stored here. It is in present Woodward County, northwestern Oklahoma. XIV THE WINTER WARPATH Around-about storms continued to threaten. The air was crisp but uncertain. Everybody must turn to and help erect store-houses to shelter the supplies. The Kansas Volunteers should arrive at any moment; but they did not, for they were lost and snowed in and starving, far to the north. However, in the midst of the anxiety and the impatience General Sheridan arrived. With his escort he appeared in the afternoon of November 21. He brought in 350 men: a company of the Tenth Regular Cavalry; the “Sandy” Forsyth scouts who had fought at the Arikaree, now under Lieutenant Lewis Pepoon; two companies of the Kansas Volunteers who had been sent ahead of the regiment to Fort Dodge; twelve Osage Indian scouts, and ten Kansas Indian scouts. Lieutenant Thomas Lebo of the Tenth Cavalry was in command of the escort. Everybody was glad to see General Sheridan come. With “Little Phil” on the scene, the campaign would start right up. General Custer had gone enthusiastically galloping to meet him and ride in with him, and discuss the situation. Most interesting of the new arrivals were the Osages. They hated the Cheyennes, Comanches, Kiowas, and all these raiding Indians who pillaged them as well as the whites; through the Civil War the Osages had acted as Union scouts, on the plains.