Our introduction to what should befall us later came in the rainy weather, bitter winds, insufficient clothing, and limited rations of our journey before we reached Fort Beecher, on the Arkansas River. To-day, the beautiful city of Wichita marks the spot where the miserable little group of tents and low huts, called Fort Beecher, stood then. Fifty miles east of this fort we had passed the last house we were to see for half a year. The Arkansas runs bottomside up across the Plains. Its waters are mainly under its bed, and it seems to wander aimlessly among the flat, lonely sand-bars, trying helplessly to get right again. Beyond this river we looked off into the Unknown. Somewhere back of the horizon in that shadowy illimitable Southwest General Sheridan had established a garrison on the Canadian River, and here General Custer and his Seventh United States Cavalry were waiting for us. They had forage for our horses and food and clothing for ourselves. We had left Topeka with limited supplies expecting sufficient reinforcement of food and grain at Fort Beecher to carry us safely forward until we should reach Camp Supply, Sheridan's stopping-place, wherever in the Southwest that might be. Then the two regiments, Custer's Seventh and the Kansas Nineteenth, were together to fall upon the lawless wild tribes and force them into submission. Such was the prearranged plan of campaign, but disaster lay between us and this military force on the Canadian River. Neither the Nineteenth Cavalry commanders, the scouts, nor the soldiers knew a foot of that pathless mystery-shrouded, desolate land stretching away to the southward beyond the Arkansas River. We had only a meagre measure of rations, less of grain in proportion, and there was no military depot to which we could resort. The maps were all wrong, and in the trackless wastes and silent sand-dunes of the Cimarron country gaunt Starvation was waiting to clutch our vitals with its gnarled claws; while with all our nakedness and famine and peril, the winter blizzard, swirling its myriad whips of stinging cold came raging across the land and caught us in its icy grip. I had learned on the Arickaree how men can face danger and defy death; I had only begun to learn how they can endure hardship. It was mid-November when our regiment, led by Colonel Crawford, crossed the Arkansas River and struck out resolutely toward the southwest. Our orders were to join Custer's command at Sheridan's camp in the Indian Territory, possibly one hundred and fifty miles away. We must obey orders. It is the military man's creed. That we lacked rations, forage, clothing, and camp equipment must not deter us, albeit we had not guides, correct maps, or any knowledge of the land we were invading.