“General Sully found this out, in 1868, when he supposed he was marching upon an Indian village from which the families had been removed and hidden in another direction, while the warriors led Sully on a wild-goose chase into the Wichita Mountains. It is a wonder his whole command was not annihilated, and if he had followed the Indians a little further, not a soldier would have escaped, the trap was so well set. But Sully realized the danger just in time, turned around, got out of the mountains almost by a miracle, returning to Fort Dodge for reinforcements, with the Indians harassing him all the way back. This ambush and defeat was a source of great mortification to General Sully. General Custer then took the field with big reinforcements, and surprised the Indian camp on the Wichita River; but, after the attack, Custer, too, was forced to beat a hasty retreat to Camp Supply, as he found himself greatly outnumbered nearly ten to one. He inflicted on the Indians a severe punishment, taking nearly two hundred women and children prisoners, which greatly disheartened the Indians for a while. But this success was in the dead of winter, and might have resulted differently had it happened in the summer season, with the Indian fighting according to his views of proper war tactics. (_See picture, page 302._) “It was a big mistake of the National Government to appoint civilians and representatives of different religious denominations as Government Agents. We should have appointed army officers instead, at a post where there was also an agency. This was merely a necessity of the times and conditions, clearly visible to anybody in the least acquainted with the needs of the situation. Soldiers were always stationed at an agency, the commander of that post was always subject to the orders of the Agent, a civilian often wholly unqualified to direct military movements or frontier exploits, and the ideas of commander and Agent were nearly always in conflict. The officer bitterly resented being subject to the Agent’s orders and certainly the former, familiar as he was with the border and Indian, knew better than the Agent could know, coming as he did, as a rule, direct from civilized centers. While treating them kindly and fairly, an army officer would have governed the Indian with a firm hand, and with none of the little less than criminal weakness displayed by many of the Agents. Moreover, most of the Agents were not good men, and not only robbed the Indian but starved him. I personally knew of graft practised by several Agents by which the Indian suffered greatly. Let me cite one of many instances of weakness that fell under my own observation. Mr. Darlington, Agent of the Cheyenne and Arapaho, was a good old Quaker, but weak and unsophisticated to a marked degree. I was sutler for the soldiers at this agency, and these Indians had stolen a lot of horses and mules from me. One issue day, the Indians