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Three of the dead are found, two of them scalped, and otherwise hacked and slashed.
Fifty-five mules and ponies, which they left behind, are gone.
Their skins, their tents, their buffalo meats, are either taken or destroyed.
Cast down by their misery, the. Osages seek their trail, recross the frontier, and return to their proper camp, the hunters almost naked, and the squaws and little ones on foot.
An Indian Agent, much excited by this massacre, rides to Medicine Lodge, a stockade on the Prairie, where he finds Captain Rickers and sixty border men, acting as militia under a regular commission from Governor Osborn.
“Who killed the four Osages?”
repeats Captain Rickers, in high contempt, “ we killed the Osages; and we mean to kill the vermin whenever we catch them in our State.”
Rickers refuses to give the Indian Agent details of the fray.
The captured ponies are at Medicine Lodge; the agent sees them there, and knows them by their Indian marks.
Appeals are made to Governor Osborn in Topeka, but the governor will not interfere with his militia.
Rickers, he says, is captain of a company of State
1875.
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