Arrow and Plow

The night attack on the great emigrant encampment was a thing which had
been preparing for years. The increasing number of the white men, the
lessening numbers of the buffalo, meant inevitable combat with all the
tribes sooner or later.

Now the spring hunt of the northern Plains tribes was on. Five hundred
lodges of the Sioux stood in one village on the north side of the
Platte. The scaffolds were red with meat, everywhere the women were
dressing hides and the camp was full of happiness. For a month the great
Sioux nation had prospered, according to its lights. Two hundred stolen
horses were under the wild herdsmen, and any who liked the meat of the
spotted buffalo might kill it close to camp from the scores taken out of
the first caravans up the Platte that year--the Mormons and other early
trailers whom the Sioux despised because their horses were so few.

But the Sioux, fat with boudins and dépouille and marrowbones, had
waited long for the great Western train which should have appeared on
the north side of the Platte, the emigrant road from the Council Bluffs.
For some days now they had known the reason, as Jim Bridger had
explained--the wagons had forded the river below the Big Island. The
white men's medicine was strong.

The Sioux did not know of the great rendezvous at the forks of the Great
Medicine Road. Their watchmen, stationed daily at the eminences along
the river bluffs of the north shore, brought back scoffing word of the
carelessness of the whites. When they got ready they, too, would ford
the river and take them in. They had not heeded the warning sent down
the trail that no more whites should come into this country of the
tribes. It was to be war.