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Show THE NOBLE RED MAN. 543 Pacific Railroad. Ouster, as usual, was put in the lead, and soon after reaching the Yellowstone had several skirmishes with the Indians, who were desperately resolved against the passage of a railroad through the country. If they could only have looked forward over the next year of the financial world, they might have been spared all anxiety on that point. During this march the sutler and veterinary surgeon of the Seventh Cavalry were murdered by a Sioux called Rain- in- the- Face ; and out of that matter grew the latter's hostility to Custer, and perhaps the latter's tragic death three years after. Early in 1874 began the memorable Black Hills expedition, an un-dertaking that began in the grossest injustice and ended in wholesale murder. From the first discovery in California, rumors had con-stantly prevailed of great gold placers in the Black Hills, but the re-gion was a mystery. The Warren Expedition, in 1857, had gone around the whole district, but the Sioux emphatically prohibited them from entering it, stating that it was sacred ground. Other expeditions proved that the region was a great oval, about a hundred by sixty miles in extent, cut up by numerous low mountain ranges covered with timber ; that it possessed, as do all such mountainous regions, a more rainy climate than the plains, and scores of little valleys of great fertility. It is obvious, from the lay of the country, that the re-gion can not contain any great area of agricultural land, but quite probable that it abounds in good mountain pastures and timbered hills. The tenacity with which the Sioux clung to it only the more convinced the Westerners that it contained gold by millions, and many were the exciting stories told. The treaty of 1868 confirmed it to Red Cloud and other chiefs in person in Washington, and the Black Hills were declared inviolable a section of the Indian reservation never to be trespassed upon by white men. The Custer expedition of 1874 was undertaken in direct violation of that treaty, and upon the half- avowed principle that treaties were not to be kept with Indians if whites needed the country in question. Consistent with this ill- faith the expedition was made the occasion of ridiculous exaggeration, not to say downright falsehood. Correspondents were sent along with descriptive powers suited to an earthly Eden, and they described one ; explorers went to find gold by millions, and they found it. The country needed a sensation, and the Government took the contract of supplying it. When the expedition had returned, and the brilliant correspondents had made their report, General Hazen un-dertook to moderate popular enthusiasm by portraying the high plains as they generally are ; but the public rejected him, and found in his |