William Hepworth Dixon, White Conquest: Volume 1

[254] a dangerous road, although a railway runs along the creek, and they are hardly a dozen miles from Sheridan station, when Grey Eagle and his band of Cheyennes come on them in the night. Germain and his son are instantly scalped and hacked to shreds. The wife and invalid girl are brained and chopped to pieces, all the meats and drinks gobbled up, the traps set on fire, and the younger girls carried to the camp; the Cheyenne warriors leaving nothing behind them but a charred wheel and shaft, with four dead bodies beaten out of human shape; nothing, as Grey Eagle fancied, that could either serve to mark his victims, or betray his trail. The deed is done, the murderers lost in space.

When news come into Leavenworth that a fresh massacre has been committed on the Smoky Hill, no one believes the tale. But day by day the story is confirmed, on which a party of men goes out to see the spot. Bones, much picked by wolves and ravens, lie about the Prairie track. Lumps of burnt wood are strewn around. No one knows the victims of this Indian outrage, but that murder has been done no man who passes by that road can