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Will old Leavenworth’s departed glories ever return? Indian Wars are forever past and I never want to see another war mobilizing a hundred thousand men here; nor do I believe another war could. The aeroplanes and submarine explain that.

All the same, Leavenworth is worth the run out. It explains why neither Kansas City nor Omaha could ever have been here. The Missouri Flats are too wide here—eight miles in flood tide. A rail bridge here was for all time an impossibility; but here from 1827 were concentrated eight hundred troopers—the majority mounted with a pack mule for each horseman—besides officers for every unit of one hundred and two hundred men. The flats gave inland expresses pasture and water to prepare to cross to the Platte. The army units were detailed to keep order amid a million warring raiding tribes much more hostile to one another than to the whites. Cholera and sunstroke across the thousand miles of pathless plains patrolled were, down to the 1870’s, much more deadly than raiders’ arrows. We know now that much of what was called cholera was nothing more than the terrible effects of alkali water with a meat diet and heat to broil one’s brains. No white could stand up against day sweats that drenched in a Turkish bath and night chills called “ague” and the constant drainage of reserve strength by enteric disease. Much less could he withstand the drain if he could not resist the temptation to hunt buffalo in the heat of midday, when the buffalo clustered in the shade of the poplars and cottonwoods along stream beds. Hunters’ blood up, the troopers gave chase. The herds stampeded for the hot unshaded sand and lava plains. The white rider followed and paid for his folly. Of one group of eight hundred troopers sent west in all the panoply of war to impress the plains Indians during the 1830’s, fewer than two hundred came back alive. The dead were buried on the plains where they fell to be devoured by wolves scraping up graves. Only a few were brought back to be interred in some fort.