Washita, were also the winter encampments of the Kiowas, the
Comanches, the Arapahoes, and even a few Apaches. He attacked at
dawn of a bleak winter morning, November 27, 1868, after taking
the precaution of surrounding the camp, and killed Black Kettle,
and another chief, Little Rock, and over a hundred of their
warriors. Many women and children also were killed in this
attack. The result was one which sank deep into the Indian mind.
They began to respect the men who could outmarch them and outlive
them on the range. Surely, they thought, these were not the same
men who had abandoned Forts Phil Kearney, C. F. Smith, and Reno.
There had been some mistake about this matter. The Indians began
to think it over. The result was a pacifying of all the country
south of the Platte. The lower Indians began to come in and give
themselves up to the reservation life.

One of the hardest of pitched battles ever fought with an Indian
tribe occurred in September, 1868, on the Arickaree or South Fork
of the Republican River, where General "Sandy" Forsyth, and his
scouts, for nine days fought over six hundred Cheyennes and
Arapahoes. These savages had been committing atrocities upon the
settlers of the Saline, the Solomon, and the Republican valleys,
and were known to have killed some sixty-four men and women at
the time General Sheridan resolved to punish them. Forsyth had no
chance to get a command of troops, but he was allowed to enlist
fifty scouts, all "first-class, hardened frontiersmen," and with
this body of fighting men he carried out the most dramatic battle
perhaps ever waged on the Plains.

Forsyth ran into the trail of two or three large Indian villages,
but none the less he followed on until he came to the valley of