Similarly trained troops took their places along the northern border, and beyond a little wire cutting, overcame the disturbances from the Fenians. And as these fearful threats to the north, east and south of us were slowly calmed, we began to be over-confident and stupid again. We failed to see that our unusual strength had been the reason for coming through these calamities unscathed. In our customary way we descended into weakness. And how we were going to pay in human life for this let-down! At first we pared the Army down to thirty-eight thousand. The day before General Grant took the oath of office as President, we again reduced it, against his urgent recommendation, by twenty regiments. By 1876 it was a scant twenty-five thousand soldiers, at which figure it remained up until the time of the Spanish-American War--during almost a quarter of a century. Thus we stagnated while our population was increasing, savages were roaming over half our territory and we had acquired Alaska. There was a war party who wanted to keep peace and a peace party who let us fall into war. Naturally you’d know which party would win in the United States. A paltry seventeen thousand soldiers were strewn around the west in little groups. Their task was to control hundreds of thousands of Indians in protection of the advancing settlers. It was the dark age for the soldier. Impossible was his struggle to be everywhere at once and to do the government’s bidding against odds of twenty-four to one. In return the government often armed the Indian with fine repeating rifles and always gave the soldier a single-loader. Then came the tragedies that follow in the wake of helplessness. In our history books, we have placed an embroidered, starched sham over them, but underneath none the less lie very dirty pillows. Massacres of our settlers and soldiers were too frequent. The Indian was one of the shrewdest warriors of all time to sense the size and strength of his opponents. Weakness to him meant a call for scalps. At Fort Phil Kearney in Nebraska the officers and men were engaged in building their own barracks and quarters (if they were going to have a roof to cover them) and the work was going along quite smoothly, when one morning two thousand Indians swooped down on the small garrison of two hundred fifty and killed and mutilated one hundred seventy-four of them. In Kansas when eighty-four settlers were slain or captured by a band of Cheyennes, Major Forsyth with fifty scouts tried to trail the Indian desperadoes. When he came upon them he was trapped, had to fight for his life, lost half of his command, (among whom was the nephew of Henry Ward Beecher,) and barely escaped with the remnants of his force.