them understand it. I think in 1876 I had about 100 acres of corn, and in two hours after they commenced to light I believe they would average a depth of four inches all over the ground, and as much hanging to the stalks of the corn as could find holding places. A person who has never seen them, you can't make them understand it. I had a nice crop there in 1876, at ten o'clock in the morning, and at four o'clock in the afternoon there was absolutely nothing left on the place. I had an acre of onions, and every place there had been an onion there was a hole in the ground. You couldn't walk over a corn field any more than nothing. They would light on anything like a corn field or anything that was possible for them to eat, and they were thicker there than other places. They would gather in there.

In the summer of 1872 there was one company of soldiers camped on the Willow. Buck and some others represented they were necessary. They camped in tents. They had nothing permanent, and they did not stay very long. They left before cold weather. My recollection is there were not over fifty there all together. They camped right above where the old wagon road used to cross near where Helm lives now. It is quite a little ways farther north than where the railroad crosses the old wagon road of the buffalo hunters. We had a bridge there. They camped right in the bend just above there.12

Here is another little thing. They organized in 1873. This Buck party sent a man by the name of Wildman down to Lincoln to lobby the legislature to make the counties larger than they had been making them. Their custom had been to make the counties twenty-four miles square. They wanted to make Arapahoe and Red Willow the county seats, and so they lobbied the legislature to enlarge the boundaries of the counties, to make them thirty miles wide north and south, so it would throw Arapahoe and Red Willow a little nearer the center of the counties.18 This old man Smith, the agent of the Republican

"The report of the adjutant-general, dated October 12, 1872, shows that there were then at Camp Red Willow, near the junction of Red Willow Creek and the Republican River, one company each from the Second Cavalry, Third Cavalry and Ninth Infantry, under the command of Captain J. D. Devin of the company last named. Report of the Secretary of War, 1872, p. 104.

13 Furnas, Red Willow and Hitchcock were four townships wide and five long, and Chase and Dundy the same width but still another township long, to reach the Colorado line. They were all established by the legislature of 1873. Phelps, established by this legislature, was of the regular form and size. So all the counties east of Harlan, to Gage, were four townships, or twenty-four miles square.

Valley Land Association, that was the same as the Lincoln Land Company, had got hold of a lot of land right where Bartley is, expecting when the counties were organized that would be the center of the county, and they would get the county seat located there where Bartley is. They had got several quarter sections of land in there, so when the bill passed the legislature changing the size of the counties from what had been their size, that is what started him out here to get land where Indianola is so as to get near the center of one of the counties. The B. & M. Railroad Company was expecting to come up that valley, and the land association had their men out to get land where they expected to locate a town, and he had secured a lot of land where Bartley is, but when the legislature changed the size of the counties it threw it all over to one side.

BATTLE OF MASSACRE CANON

The Pawnee came out there on a buffalo hunt to secure some meat. They crossed to the south side of the Republican River, way down below Red Willow county some place, and went up the Beaver and Sappa. The buffalo country was cov ered with them, and the Pawnee had pretty good luck, and they came up and went to cross from the Beaver to the Republican, near where Trenton is, and they met some buffalo hunters who told them their old enemies, the Sioux, were hunting on the divide between the Republican and the Frenchman, and they said that was not right, that the white men didn't want them to hunt, and they crossed the river and went along a long cañon that comes in from the north, now called Massacre Cañon, and went up this cañon eight or ten miles to get up near the top of the divide; but the Sioux had seen them and knew they were coming up that cañon, and they hid themselves back from the banks of the cañon, on both sides, until the Pawnee had got clear up in by them, and they came down on them from each side and just massacred them. They killed 64 right there on the ground and killed a number of others that died farther down. The Pawnee were not in any position to help themselves, so they took right down the cañon. I was there the next day. The Pawnee had put up their meat, and they had all their horses loaded-everything they could possibly cure, and it was nearly the whole tribe of Pawnee. They had nearly all their household goods, and they cut everything else from their ponies, and their meat and things was piled up and strung along. They even lost their dogs, hundreds of dogs and hides. The summer buffalo hides are no good for robes, but the Pawnee had taken the hides off and tanned them to do up their meat in and for other purposes in camp, and they had

all those hides. A great many people went up there and gathered up those hides and made leather things of them. Taylor made a house of them. They had killed two buffaloes [for meat]. The squaws had commenced to skin them when the Sioux attacked them. It was in the early part of the day. In those cottonwood trees along the river a great many Indians had been buried. They laid poles or something across, where there were forks, and they wrapped them [bodies] in hides to keep birds or animals from interfering with them.

The land here in 1872 was out of the market, that is, you could not make filings until the land office was open and in running order at Lowell, which was the 8th day of August, I think. The other party had gone, but we stayed there to go to the land office and make our filings, and Hill came down and wanted to go with us. We told him we were out of grub. He said he was pretty nearly out. He had a little bit of flour and some molasses. We told him to bring it down and come on. He brought his stuff down, and we told him to put it in the grub box. We hadn't had any grub in it for some time. We had found several Indian skulls, and we had put them in the grub box for safe keeping, and when we went to put his grub in, he said, "My Lord, what are you fellows living on?" There was places where they were buried out away from the river, and they had put up forks and laid poles across, and they were buried on platforms of poles. But mostly they had put them up in trees there.

We were never troubled by the Sioux. The only Indians I ever saw in Red Willow county were the Pawnee, the Omaha and the Oto, that used to come up from their reservations hunting buffaloes. The only trouble with the Pawnee was their picking up and taking little things. Like one day I had been giving them some things, and I had a big sheath knife, and it was sheathed and thrown down on the ground by the wagon, and I looked and he had stuck his foot into the belt and walked away right straight. I hollered at him, and he just took his foot up and went right on. We were never in any danger from any Indians or anything of that kind.

I will tell you about a buffalo hunt. They were north of my place on Dry Creek, on the divide. A man by the name of Bill Berger, county commissioner, he had lost some horses, and heard that a party by the name of Clifford, a squaw man who lived on the Medicine, had found them, and Berger wanted to go over there and get them. He had no horses, so I took my

14 For further accounts of this battle see Nebraska State Historical Society, Collections, XVI, 165; ibid., XVII, 38.