The Cheyenne war party crossed the Smoky Hill River near Fort Hays on the evening of August 7, 1868, and halted to smoke the peace pipe. Black Kettle, the chief who had signed the treaty at Medicine Lodge Creek the year before, wanted the soldiers to understand his intentions. “I like my white brothers,” he said through the interpreter Hill Bay Wilson. “My heart is happy when I meet them.
I shake their hands in friendship. The white soldiers should always be happy because their horses are large and strong, and they have many guns and much food. All other Indians may take the warpath, but Black Kettle will forever keep the friendship of his white brothers. ”
At dawn the next morning, the band moved east toward the settlements, and on their first night they camped on the Saline River near the mouth of Spillman Creek.
Two Indians slipped away to a nearby farmhouse, seized the women inside, and raped them. The next day, the killing began. The Cheyenne raids that swept across the Kansas and Nebraska frontier in 1868 and 1869 did not come without warning. When the Civil War ended, the federal government had tried to secure a lasting peace on the Kansas border by negotiating with the southern plains tribes.
A treaty at Little Arkansas in 1865 set aside reservations, but it was flawed from the start because many of the bands involved never agreed to its terms. Two years later, at Medicine Lodge Creek, federal commissioners signed a more comprehensive treaty. The Cheyenne and Arapaho were to accept reservations in Indian Territory and receive yearly supplies of food, clothing, and other goods from the government, along with the exclusive right to hunt south of the Arkansas River. The terms were generous, and for a time a welcome calm settled over the Kansas prairie.
By the spring of 1868, however, the Cheyenne and Arapaho gathered at the Pawnee River and Walnut Creek had grown restless. The bands claimed that the peace commissioners had promised them guns and ammunition that never arrived. Though the Senate had not yet ratified the Medicine Lodge treaty, the Indian agent E. W.
Wynkoop believed he could keep the tribes satisfied. General Philip H. Sheridan, commanding the Department of the Missouri, was far less optimistic. He had just finished inspecting Forts Larned and Dodge, and he saw the young warriors in an angry, agitated state.
He feared that hostilities would come with the summer buffalo hunt. When the complaining chiefs asked for a council, Sheridan refused, saying the whole matter still rested with the peace commissioners. Destitution soon settled over the tribes. Game was disappearing fast, the annuities provided only partial relief at best, and Congress made things worse by appropriating funds irregularly.
Three times during the spring, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs urged Congress to act. Instead of the million dollars requested, Congress provided only half that sum in July, and it had to be spent by the War Department rather than the Indian Bureau. The promised supplies still had not arrived when about four hundred restless young Cheyenne, joined by a small number of Arapaho and Kiowa warriors, decided to raid the peaceful Kaw reservation in Morris County. Led by the Cheyenne chiefs Tall Bull and Little Robe, they left their lodges and on June 2 approached the part of the reservation near Council Grove.
When the Kaws learned of their coming, they quickly gathered about two hundred warriors to repel the attack. The battle raged inconclusively for three hours before Tall Bull ordered a withdrawal late in the evening. On the way back to their camp, the Cheyenne raiders wrecked a path of destruction. They rode their horses through the streets of Council Grove, yelling, firing their weapons, and terrorizing the residents.
Several warriors attacked and assaulted a Black woman. A mile down the road they entered the home of William Barde and looted it. For miles they plundered every farm and killed the livestock. At the time of the Kaw and Council Grove raids, annuity goods including guns and ammunition were on their way to Fort Larned for the Indians.
Before the shipment arrived, the Indian Bureau learned of the hostilities and ordered Wynkoop not to issue the weapons. When the goods reached the agency, Wynkoop had to explain to the Indians why he could not hand over what had been promised. He reported that the Indians were greatly displeased and believed their white brothers were pulling back the hand they had extended at Medicine Lodge Creek. Fearing an outbreak on the southern plains, the commissioner reversed himself and telegraphed Wynkoop: if he was convinced that issuing the arms and ammunition was necessary to preserve the peace, and that no harm would come of it, then let the Indians have them.
Wynkoop welcomed the concession and immediately distributed the guns and ammunition to those under his charge. On August 3, a band of two hundred forty Cheyenne under Black Kettle left their camp above the forks of Walnut Creek and traveled north. They crossed the Smoky Hill range near Fort Hays, where they spent the evening of August 7 smoking the peace pipe. From Fort Hays they moved east toward the settlements.
At Spillman Creek, they approached farmhouses pretending friendship and asking for food. Knowing how much the Indians loved coffee, some of the women brewed it for them. The warriors pretended to be angry that it was served in tin cups. As Sheridan later wrote, they threw the hot contents into the women’s faces after first capturing the men.
Then they raped the women until they lost consciousness. At every farm they stole the cattle and burned the cabin. They killed or captured every white person they found on Spillman Creek. The raiders then moved to the south fork of the Solomon River, where settlers, unaware of the recent atrocities, received them kindly and offered food.
Sheridan said that kindness was repaid with murder, plunder, and worse. From the south fork, Black Kettle’s band went to the north fork, where they were welcomed warmly. But a group of settlers who had received warnings of their hostility opened fire when the raiders came within range. The Indians, clearly wanting to avoid a fair fight, circled the frontiersmen for a time and then rode off, killing one settler as they retreated.
They killed three men and one woman, and took two little girls named Bell as hostages. The band then turned south toward Saline, leaving behind on the Solomon River fifteen dead and many ruined homes. Besides the Bell girls, they carried off Mrs. Annie Morgan and Miss Sarah White as captives.
Responding to settlers’ calls for help, the commander at Fort Harker sent a cavalry detachment to the area. The soldiers found the Indians storming the home of Alonzo Shermanhorn, where some pioneers had gathered to defend themselves. Hearing gunfire, the troopers came rushing over the hills, and the raiders fled in every direction, scattering in their usual way so as to leave no easy trail to follow. After escaping their pursuers, they met on the Saline River and split into small groups.
Some returned to their villages; others continued the warpath, killing two whites on the Republican River, attacking the Smoky Hill road, raiding Prairie Creek, and destroying a hay camp near Fort Dodge. Reports of Cheyenne atrocities now poured into the capital at Topeka. Governor Samuel J. Crawford, wanting to see evidence of the Indian attacks for himself, made a quick inspection of the stricken region.
When he returned to his office on August 17, he sent a request to President Andrew Johnson for federal help in suppressing the uprising. He told the president that settlements covering a sixty-mile stretch from Saline to the Republican had been destroyed, the country laid to ashes, and the soil stained with blood. The adjutant general of Kansas later said the miserable condition of the settlers in the valley could only be understood by an eyewitness. Upon receiving Crawford’s message, President Johnson authorized General William T.
Sherman, commanding the Division of the Missouri, to accept the service of one regiment of volunteer cavalry from Kansas for six months. General Sheridan was ordered to use all his forces to put down the Cheyenne uprising. On August 22, Sherman wrote to the assistant adjutant general in Washington that he had instructed Sheridan to force the Indians south of the Kansas line, where further patience with them was impossible. Sheridan established his headquarters at Fort Hays.
On October 7 he reported to his superior that all the Indians of the Upper Arkansas were involved in the conflict. At Fort Hays, Sheridan prepared to stop the Indian troubles once and for all. The only solution he believed in was to subdue the savages by forcing the various tribes to settle on the reservation assigned by the Medicine Lodge treaty. By late autumn he had twenty-six hundred men under his command, plus a Kansas volunteer regiment under Colonel Crawford, who had resigned as governor to take part in the campaign.
The campaign was postponed until after the fall hunt, when the hostiles would be gathered in their winter villages and their horses weakened by lack of pasture. Congress gave Sheridan authority to hire fifty plainsmen as scouts. Major George A. Forsyth of the Ninth Cavalry took command of this force, which was sent to investigate reports of raids on wagon stations near Fort Wallace.
The scouts had just reached the fort when word came that a Cheyenne war party had attacked a wagon train near Sheridan. After killing two drivers and capturing their cattle, the Indians burned the train of forty wagons. Forsyth’s small force immediately set out for the attack site and found a fresh trail that quickly widened, indicating other bands were joining the raiders. Realizing he was approaching a large body of Indians, Forsyth ordered his exhausted scouts to stop and rest for the night.
They camped on the south bank of the Arikaree Fork of the Republican River in eastern Colorado. Across from their camp, in the nearly dry riverbed, lay a long strip of sandy ground covered with low bushes, an island when the river ran high. At dawn the next day, September 17, 1868, six Indians rushed the sleeping camp and tried to stampede the horses. Forsyth and his men quickly retreated to the island, and within minutes hundreds of Cheyenne and Sioux were on horseback charging.
Armed with new Spencer repeating rifles, the scouts beat back the mounted attacks but could not break them. Again and again the Indians returned that day and the next two days. Forsyth and his second-in-command, Lieutenant Frederick H. Beecher, realized their only hope was to send for help.
Four men volunteered, two on the first night and two on the third, to try to reach Fort Wallace ninety miles away. After the third day the fighting stopped entirely, and from the sixth day no more Indians were seen. On the ninth day, Captain Louis H. Carpenter’s company of the Tenth Cavalry, the Buffalo Soldiers, arrived after being summoned by two of the scouts, and rescued Forsyth’s men.
Lieutenant Beecher and Dr. John H. Mowers lay among the dead; Forsyth was wounded. The major reported killing more than thirty Indians, including the Cheyenne warrior Roman Nose.
Later, a young chief told Forsyth the Indians had suffered even greater losses. Although Forsyth’s pursuit had perhaps reduced their confidence, it did not limit their activity. In early autumn a Cheyenne war party attacked a wagon train coming into Kansas from New Mexico. Every driver was killed, the wagons burned, and all horses and mules stolen.
Mrs. Clara Blinn and her two-year-old son were taken captive. On October 13, a large group swept through the Solomon Valley, leaving a trail of death and plunder behind. Four settlers were killed and two wounded.
It was a time, as one pioneer put it, when a man would not be surprised to wake up and find himself dead and scalped. The Solomon Valley raid was the last reported that autumn, as the warriors withdrew to their winter shelters with the cold weather. Sheridan, meanwhile, was preparing his troops to move. The army had never before attacked the southern plains Indians in their winter camps.
To prevent a massacre of peaceful tribes, General Sherman ordered all friendlies gathered at the Canadian River south of the Arkansas. That done, Sheridan’s army began its deadly work. His plan called for the main force, the Seventh Cavalry under Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer, to march from Fort Hays through Camp Supply into Indian Territory.
Two smaller columns would support the move, one entering Indian Territory from New Mexico and the other coming from Fort Lyon in Colorado. Custer’s command, eleven of his regiment’s twelve companies, reached Camp Supply ahead of the other columns, and on November 23 left the post to follow a fresh Indian trail leading toward the river. Snowfall slowed the march. Before dawn on Thanksgiving Day, November 27, Custer’s scouts spotted a large Cheyenne village belonging to Black Kettle in the Washita Valley.
Orders were given to surround the village quickly and silently. Despite the bitter cold, the soldiers were not allowed to stamp their feet to warm them. At daybreak, Custer ordered the regimental band to play “Garry Owen. ” With bugle calls and shouts, the Seventh Cavalry charged into the sleeping village.
For hours, desperate fighting raged up and down the valley as the Indians sought shelter and were driven out again. Custer’s men killed more than one hundred warriors, including Black Kettle, and captured more than fifty women and children. The lodges were pulled down and burned with large quantities of food and buffalo robes, and the entire pony herd was destroyed. As the day wore on, Custer learned that this Cheyenne village was only one, the last in a chain stretching fifteen miles along the Washita River.
His own losses were light, but entering a full-scale battle with thousands of Indians would have been disastrous. He ordered a cautious withdrawal, and an hour before dusk the troops marched out of the valley and back toward Camp Supply. On December 3 the Seventh Cavalry marched triumphantly into the post and paraded before General Sheridan. The decisive blow had broken the hostile Indians’ power on the Kansas border.
As Sheridan wrote, Custer’s blow was most effective and fortunately fell upon one of the most vicious bands, which had without provocation committed the massacres on the Saline and Solomon, and whose hands were still stained with the blood of their atrocities. Through the rest of the winter, Sheridan’s army remained around Fort Cobb, gathering the remnants of the tribes onto reservations. The Cheyenne and Arapaho later settled on the upper waters of the Washita near the valley of their defeat. But although the winter campaign had punished the Indians severely, raids flared again in western Kansas in the spring of 1869.
These raids were not the work of the hostiles Sheridan had punished, but of a large band of Cheyenne Dog Soldiers under Tall Bull, who, after wintering on the Powder River, had slipped along the southern slope of the Rocky Mountains into northwestern Kansas. In May, some of Tall Bull’s warriors attacked four hunters camping on Covert Creek in Osborne County. The men escaped through the tall grass and thick brush along the creek bank. Later that month, another Dog Soldier band raided seven workers laying track for the Kansas Pacific Railroad two miles west of Fossil Creek Station.
The Indians killed two workers and wounded four others before the crew reached the safety of the station. The raiders then tore up a section of track, which later caused a westbound train to derail. Tall Bull’s warriors then turned much of their hostility toward the settlements in a desperate attempt to drive the whites from their old hunting grounds. During May they killed six men and one woman and kidnapped two boys in a raid on White Rock Creek in Republic County.
On Spillman Creek and at Saline, they killed several settlers and captured Mrs. Susan Alderdice and her child, and Mrs. Maria Weel. By the end of May, reports said the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers roamed freely in northwestern Kansas.
A report from the small town of Waterville said the Indians were combing the country north and west of the Republican River and attacking small groups of hunters on the Little Blue River. Scattered raids continued through June. Four citizens inspecting farmland at the head of White Rock Creek were attacked on June 3, killed, and their bodies horribly mutilated. A few days later, six hunters were slaughtered at the mouth of the same creek.
On June 9 at Scandia, a man and a small child were killed. By then the settlers were well armed and expecting more trouble, so the number of raids declined. A skirmish occurred about fifteen miles west of Sheridan on June 19, when about fifty Cheyenne attacked a party of surveyors. The whites were armed and beat off the attack, killing four Indians while losing two of their own.
To protect the outlying settlements, the adjutant general of Kansas, W. S. Moorehouse, placed militia at strategic points on Plum Creek, Fisher Creek, Spillman Creek, the Saline, Beaver Creek, the Republican River, and Turkey Creek near the Little Arkansas. Though the state government made some effort to defend the border, it was the United States Army that carried the war into the Indians’ country once more.
When he heard of the Dog Soldier raids, General Sheridan ordered commanders at all posts in his department to send cavalry detachments to scout the troubled region and locate enemy camps. In compliance, Major Eugene A. Carr left Fort McPherson in Nebraska on June 7, 1869, with eight companies of the Fifth Cavalry and three companies of Pawnee scouts under Major Frank North. Carr’s mission was to search the headwaters of the Republican River above the mouth of Dog Creek.
Following the Republican westward, his troops covered the country ten miles or more on either side of the river. On July 11, after marching nearly three hundred miles, Carr discovered Tall Bull’s Dog Soldier camp, with some Sioux, in a valley on the south fork of the Platte River in northeastern Colorado. The cavalry attacked at once in a furious charge, overrunning the village before the surprised Indians could secure their weapons and horses. Fifty-two warriors were killed, including Tall Bull, and seventeen women and children captured.
The few who escaped the camp were pursued for four miles, and Carr sent soldiers in every direction to gather the stray animals and seize any Indian property that could be found. Everything the soldiers could not carry, they burned. The Republican River campaign brought a successful end to the campaign Sheridan had begun a year earlier to clear western Kansas of the invading Indians. With the Cheyenne tribes severely punished, the Kansas frontier was finally open to large-scale settlement, and the southern plains remained generally free of Indian raids until the Comanche and Kiowa uprising of 1874.
In 1870, as one writer later put it, a flood of immigration swept into the state that surpassed all previous migrations, and within two years the settlements reached the Colorado border. The federal action against the Indians who had ravaged the Kansas prairies in 1868 and 1869 did more than punish the raiders; it helped advertise the potential of that vast, fertile region to those heading west. Among the captives taken in those raids was Sarah White, a seventeen-year-old girl seized from her father’s farm one August day in 1868. Her father, Benjamin White, had been one of the first settlers in Buffalo township, establishing a home for his wife and ten children after migrating from Wisconsin.
They lived in a log cabin on Granite Creek. Cheyenne warriors ambushed Benjamin and his son Jack as the two men left the house to cut hay along the Republican River bottom. Before they could reach a nearby fort, they fell dead from Cheyenne arrows and lances. Sarah knew nothing of her father’s and brother’s fate.
She looked up from her work to see six Cheyenne Indians standing at the open cabin door. Frightened, her fears subsided when her mother quietly invited the Indians inside and prepared them a meal. They pretended friendliness and ate greedily, then slipped out silently. Suddenly one turned and seized Sarah.
She screamed and struggled as he carried her outside. Another Indian jumped on his horse, and Sarah was handed up to him. They rode off like the wind, and Sarah looked back to see her mother running after her with outstretched arms, screaming and stumbling. The Indians did not stop until they reached a Cheyenne camp on Buffalo Creek.
By then Sarah had fainted from fear and hunger. Toward evening another party from the same tribe arrived at the camp, leading her father’s wagon. They had killed her father and her brother Jack by then, and perhaps her mother too, and all her family. The Indians camped only a few hours for fear of pursuit, and Sarah soon found herself on the trail again.
She had found an old newspaper and hidden it in her dress, and as they rode west she secretly tore it into small pieces and scattered them, hoping to leave a trail that might be followed. As the days passed, she lost all sense of time and direction, except that she knew from the sun they were heading west. When mountain peaks appeared on the horizon, she realized they were far from home. The Indians pushed on stubbornly through the winter.
The cold was bitter, and Sarah shivered in her ragged clothes. Three months passed, and food grew scarce. The Indians killed and ate their dogs. Some children captured by other bands were left to freeze along the trail.
One day Sarah found another white girl in camp. The Cheyenne had traded some horses for her. Sarah’s first question was, “What day of the week is this, and what month? ” The girl shook her head.
She had been a bride for only a month when she was captured in the Solomon Valley, not far from Sarah’s home. In that same raid, she was only two years older than Sarah, her blue eyes wide with grief and terror, her thick yellow hair loose around her shoulders. The Indians made the two girls slaves, forcing them to carry water and cut wood until their hands were scarred. The jealous women of the tribe beat them cruelly.
Their feet became calloused like buffalo trails, with only moccasins for protection, frozen badly. A blizzard swept down from the north across the open prairie, but the Indians kept crossing the Texas plains. With courage and resourcefulness, Sarah formed an escape plan. She had begun to understand the Indian tongue, and from the rough tones of their speech she thought they were south of the Arkansas River, with Fort Dodge on the other side.
That night she and Annie Morgan slipped away from camp in the bitter cold. They made their way toward the river through deep snowdrifts. Only a strip of ice separated them from the fort and its soldiers, but the Indians discovered their escape. The girls were recaptured, brought back to camp, and severely punished.
While the Cheyenne warriors raided Kansas and Colorado, most of the tribe’s women and children stayed in a series of tent villages in the sheltered Wichita Valley near the western border of Indian Territory. Here the war bands brought the two girls and went into winter camp. Annie stared into the whiteness with a strange, unseeing look. “We will never be rescued now,” she said.
Sarah answered firmly, “Yes, we will be rescued. ” She did not know of the plans being made to save them, nor of the epic of courage and heroism being written for them. Only much later did she learn that Governor Crawford had asked President Johnson for help to punish the Indians and rescue her and Annie Morgan. Sheridan had resolved to launch the winter campaign against the Indians, though nothing like it had ever been attempted.
The Indians had always raided in summer and lived in winter on the white man’s charity. Now Governor Crawford recruited the Nineteenth Kansas Volunteer Cavalry and joined Sheridan at Camp Supply, one hundred miles north of Fort Dodge. Sheridan sent Custer with the famous scout California Joe to head northwest and locate the Indians. After four days, on November 27, California Joe spotted the Indian village from the top of a hill overlooking it.
Custer divided his force into four columns and waited for dawn. The temperature was below zero, snow covered the ground more than a foot deep, and a fierce north wind blew. Custer ordered his men to wait until the bugle sounded the advance. With the first light of dawn, amid the bugle call mingled with the strains of “Garry Owen” played by the regimental band, the attack swept like a storm into the surprised camp.
Warriors and women fought together, but when the Battle of the Washita was over, 103 Indians lay dead and the rest of the warriors had fled. Custer pushed on until noon, though he knew other villages lay downriver with two thousand warriors, greatly outnumbering his force. At nightfall he withdrew to Camp Supply. Despite the temporary victory, it was a bitter disappointment for Custer and his troops to learn that Sarah White and Mrs.
Morgan were not there. Sheridan moved south to pursue the fleeing Indians, determined to rescue the two women. Near Fort Sill, the chiefs Satanta, Lone Wolf, and Little Raven surrendered with their tribes, but twelve hundred Cheyenne holding the two white women fled west. Sheridan sent Custer with the Seventh Cavalry and the Nineteenth Volunteers in pursuit, with orders to rescue the captives alive if possible.
For two weeks they trailed the Indians across a barren desert in subzero weather on limited rations, always finding them a day or two ahead. Custer finally overtook them on the banks of the Sweetwater River, in what is now Wheeler County, Texas. The Indians raised a white flag and demanded a council. On the frozen riverbank stood twelve hundred Cheyenne and one thousand American soldiers face to face.
Custer called forward the chiefs Dull Knife, Fat Bear, Big Head, and Medicine Arrow, and demanded the surrender of the captives. The chiefs frowned and protested, insisting there were no white women in or near their camp. Custer arrested them and announced he would hang them all unless the two girls were delivered unharmed by sunset the next day. The next morning the Indian warriors, armed and angry, rode around the white soldiers’ camp, hurling terrible threats and demanding the release of their chiefs.
They still denied having the white girls. Custer’s ultimatum stood: surrender the captives, or the chiefs would hang at sunset. Suddenly, as the sun was about to set, the figure of an Indian scout appeared on top of the nearest rocky bluff. He sat motionless on his horse and waved a signal to a farther bluff, where a second scout appeared.
He in turn waved to a third, who appeared like a phantom on a bluff even farther away. The spectacle continued, each scout summoning another from the purple haze. Finally, from the farthest point, a small horse appeared carrying two people. The Indians stopped in a group beyond the valley.
As one thousand soldiers waited, the two riders dismounted. Their hair, Sarah’s black and Annie Morgan’s golden, was braided in the Indian fashion. They wore only thin flour sacks and deerskin moccasins and trousers. They looked older than their years, sad-eyed and exhausted, and walked toward each other into a close embrace.
Officers hurried to wrap their coats around them, accompanied by Colonel Horace Moore of Kansas, who had succeeded Governor Crawford. They walked toward General Custer while the soldiers stood bareheaded. As the sun set, the Seventh Cavalry band softly played “Home, Sweet Home. ” To Sarah, in the dusk of that March day, it all seemed as unreal as her dreams on Granite Creek.
The two girls, walking as if in a trance, were placed in an ambulance and taken to Fort Dodge, where each was returned to her family. Back in familiar surroundings, Sarah tried to erase the horrors of her captivity from memory. She closed the door of her mind to those memories completely, as one drives away a nightmare, yet things were never the same. Even Granite Creek, flowing through the valley, bore a new name now.
It had been renamed White Creek in memory of her father, killed on that fateful August morning. Sarah herself had changed. She was no longer the girl with rosy cheeks and dreamy fancies. She was done with dreams.
She wanted work and activity, anything to make her forget. She worked feverishly, fighting prairie fires, fording swollen streams to bring help to the sick, carrying water to dry, burned fields. Her mother told her, “You never stop to rest. ” But Sarah felt she had to stay busy or lose her mind.
She put the thought of her captivity behind her so firmly that it began to seem unreal in the peace and safety of her life. With each year, forgetting became easier. Cheerful, quiet, and smiling, she seemed to radiate courage. That winter she taught school, and a year after her rescue she married Ela Brooks, a young Civil War veteran.
The years passed, and Sarah raised eight children. She lived to be eighty-eight, spending seventy years just a mile from the tragic event that had, in the end, a happy ending. She lived to see the log cabin where she was captured collapse until only a few scattered currant bushes remained, and to see from her window the white church steeple on the hill where her father was buried. Sarah White was no longer the dreamy girl, but in her strong simplicity she became the embodiment of the pioneer mother statue on the Kansas Statehouse grounds.
That high, resolute courage that formed the core of her life stayed with her to the end. In her last days she dozed and dreamed much. Perhaps she dreamed of her childhood in the Wisconsin woods, or of red corn ears among the yellow in harvest seasons. Perhaps she heard the bugles of the Seventh Cavalry and a band playing “Home, Sweet Home.
” She died on May 11, 1939, as quietly and bravely as she had lived. No monument stands at that site to commemorate one of the most dramatic events in pioneer history. But Sarah needs no monument. Her story is still heard in the murmur of White Creek flowing through the valley, and in the rustle of the wild blue grass along the Republican River.
Her sons and daughters and grandchildren tell her story around their fires, remembering with pride the memory of a Kansas heroine who played her part in the settling of the West.
