Mr. Commander, companions and guests: I have been requested to describe to you my recollections this evening of the Battle of the Rosebud. General Godfrey last year gave you a description of the Battle of the Little Big Horn most excellently. I hope I can approach him in my efforts tonight. I speak without notes from memory only, after a lapse of forty years, and will doubtless be incorrect in many things, but several officers of my regiment who engaged in the battle are present and may correct me, particularly Colonel Lemly, then a Lieutenant, who wrote a detailed account immediately after the battle which I have never seen; it would be interesting if he would read it so you may compare it with my recollection after forty years. As the Battle of the Rosebud was so different, although second in importance in the Sioux war to the Battle of the Little Big Horn (in that it only occupied about four and a half hours), I am going to ask you to indulge me a few minutes to tell you some of the happenings which led up to this fight with the Sioux Indians. First I want to say I have had a great deal of experience with wild animals and wild Indians, and so far as I know the buffalo were the only wild animals wholly nomadic, having no habitation or home, and their companions, the Sioux Indians, are the only humans that were entirely nomadic. Coronado tells us of his great explorations through northern "New Spain," of the movement of the Indian cows, as the Spaniards called them, and their companions, the Indians, in his marches northward from the Pecos River (where the Indians had never before seen horses, they using dogs for their pack animals, and the Spaniards had never before seen buffalo and so called them cows), with the buffalo and Indians to the Platte River near what is now McPherson, Nebraska, so that to understand our discussion, with the relations that the Army had to the Sioux, we ought to understand that they were confirmed nomads as much as the buffalo that furnished their supplies. I have seen the whole face of the earth covered with buffalo moving at from four to six miles an hour. In 1857-58 I traveled twice back and forth through Kansas, Indian Territory and Texas to the Pecos River (the buffalo never went west or south of the Pecos River), and encountered the buffalo and Indians moving back and forth; the buffalo in such great numbers that I felt the earth tremble under their movement, and we were obliged to stop our vehicles and turn the animals' heads in the direction of the buffaloes' flight, firing our pistols to scare them away.