The dangers attending the building of the road were sometimes very great, as the Indians saw very plainly that it was the white man's encroachment on his hunting-grounds. And when even the telegraph-poles were being put up, long before, the Indians imagined that the government was thus putting them up to fence off their hunting-grounds, so they could not get any more buffalo! And once, after I came to Fort Sedgwick, the wires were said to be "down," and no communication could be had with other posts in the upper country. It was feared that the Indians had been tampering with the wires, and torn them down. But the operators went out under an escort of soldiers to see what the difficulty was. They came back again in a couple of days, and reported that the Indians had not meddled with the wires at all. But it seemed that some buffaloes in a large drove had taken the privilege of scratching their rumps against the poles, and thus tore them down; and getting their horns entangled in the wires, the wild creatures had carried off about four miles of telegraph-wire! WHY DOES NOT THE INDIAN MEDDLE WITH THE TELEGRAPH? It is said that the pioneer company over the plains got together several chiefs and explained as well as they could the _modus operandi_ of obtaining electricity from the clouds, and making it useful in conveying intelligence to great distances. This was hard for them to believe, because they are superstitious, and attribute all phenomena they do not fully understand to _conjuration_ or _charms_, such as their medicine-man practices. However, they concluded to put the matter to a test. So it was that two principal Indians, about one hundred miles apart, agreed to send a message over the lines on a given day, and then they would travel toward each other as fast as they could to see if the message (known only to themselves and the operator) should be correct. Of course it proved as we would expect, and they were satisfied. This intelligence has spread from one tribe to another, and they, believing that it is somehow (as it is in truth) connected with the Great Spirit who controls the winds and the storms; hence they do not meddle with it. PLUM CREEK MASSACRE. But it is not to be supposed that the Indians quietly submitted to the building of the railroad through their country. The most formidable obstacle which was met with in building the road occurred in 1866, by the throwing off the track a train of cars at Plum Creek, near the Platte River, two hundred and thirty miles west of Omaha.