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You had to be a tough kid. Out there where I grew up, if you were soft, all the other kids would beat the daylights out of you. Consequently you grew tough in all your sensitive parts, just as your bare feet did in order to avoid the pain of splinters, stone bruises and rude boot heels. Nevertheless, there was one valid, scalp-raising fear in my early life which has completely lost touch with current realities. When I have spoken of it, my children have seemed incredulous. Yet history is on the side of my memory when I say that along that narrow fringe of plains civilization where we grew up, everybody lived in fear of Indians.

I was a year old when, to the north of us, Custer and his men were massacred. In the fall of 1878, when I was three and a half years old, a band of Northern Cheyennes, led by Chief Dull Knife, slaughtered some white people living on Sappa Creek and Beaver Creek, in Decatur and Rawlins counties. Other things had happened, were happening and were told of over and over in the nighttime glow around our kitchen stove, while neighbors sat and blew upon their steaming coffee poured in saucers. A Kansas white woman, when carried off by Indians, had written pleas for help on scraps of paper with which she made a trail for rescuers to follow. Why, so often did we hear the tale I almost seemed to see that despairing woman tearing paper and even her apron into scraps. Though adult voices were lowered to discuss her plight, only a dumb kid would fail to get better than a glimmering of an understanding as to why the Indians saved the women and girls, although invariably scalping men and boys. At five I was a paleface vulnerable to scalping, and knew it.