Hunton's and Clay's ranch houses were loaded with firearms, looked like armories, and at the height of the shoulder in the log walls were fort holes through which guns could be fired. These were used several times, but none of the skirmishes approached in any degree the present-day pictures one sees in the movies, and I doubt if they ever did, in the West. In the first place, while the Sioux, Cheyenne and other redskins were considered especially bloodthirsty, none of them was fond of exposing his worthless carcass to a shower of bullets, even though outnumbering the whites 100 to 1. The Indian of that day--of the day that history was making on the frontier--was a most miserable coward when dealing with frontiersmen of the Hunton or Clay calibre. Of course, there were open battles with United States troops, but even then only when, as in the case of Custer and his Seventh Cavalry, the troops were outnumbered and trapped. Even Sitting Bull's band, which has wrongly been represented by some historians as brave, were entitled to no credit of that kind. Custer was trapped in a big bowl and his 300-odd fighters surrounded on all sides by several thousand well mounted and well-armed young bucks. The Custer and the earlier so-called Indian battles both at old Fort Phil Kearney and earlier in Minnesota, were not battles at all--simply massacres. There is no record of an even fight between redskins and whites in the settlement of the country between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains. The Modocs fought for months in the lava beds, but seldom did a soldier see a Modoc. So it was with old Geronomo and his Apache followers. They fought from cover, never in the open unless overtaken and surrounded. Nevertheless, the raiding bands of Ogalala Sioux that slipped over the Platte in the season of good grass were a problem for these pioneer ranchmen and transportation outfits, and it was not an uncommon thing for a bullet or an arrow to reach a vital spot in a bullwhacker from some hiding place just in range of the road. When this happened it was the common practice for members of the outfit to mount their saddle horses, with which every bull-train was well supplied, and give chase unless the lead of the Indians was too great, and usually it was. Once in a while, however, the Indian made a miscalculation, and the bullwhacker would return to the temporarily corralled outfit with a scrubby Indian pony, a few rawhide thongs, and an Indian's ear freshly amputated for use as evidence at the first camp of bullwhackers or army post that one more "Good Indian" had been put on the list.