2 Gun Western, May 1957 — page 33: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

| Arapahoes liquidated so many set- tlers that Governor Evans of the Territory of Colorado realized that he had to do something pretty fast or he wouldn’t have anybody to gov- ern, So he prevailed on the Army and on August 9, 1865, three companies of soldiers led by Major ILElias Dodge of the Fort Lyons garrison went into the field. They ambushed the Arapahoes at their summer catp in north-central Colorado, in a mor- aine in what is now called the South St. Vrain canyon. And what they did to those Arapahoes should have taught the Indians the folly of exterminating settlers, But it didn’t. Instead, one month later, their chief appointed a big buck named Fish-That-Swims-in-the Mountain-Rivers as the tribe’s new war captain. His job was to toughen up the young Arapahoes so that they could take on the U. S. Army and, next time, reverse the score. But the way the captain went at his training program proved that he had more name than brains. His first official act was the establishment of a suicidal system by which each youth of the tribe would prove his qualification to wear a _ warrior’s feather. Each teen-age boy, the captain announced, would be required to go into the rugged Rockies alone and, armed only with a knife, kill a full-grown male bear. That, the captain said, would prove beyond doubt that he was indeed a short-bladed THE OLD WEST'S N THE SPRING of 1865 the 33 STRANGEST — by DEAN W. BALLENGER young man of much guts as well as real capability with a knife. But a bear is not a creature which can readily be exterminated by a the plan was abandoned three months later for the practical reason that more bears than boys survived those contests But Fish-That-Swims-in-the-Moun- tain-Rivers was an inventive char- acter and dedicated to his task—even if he wasn’t very bright and—he promptly came up with another Yes, the gentle, intelligent Arapahoe who conceived the idea of reservations to stop his peonpile’s bloody atrocities, and the brutal killer whose renegade wild bunch terrorized the whole West, were one and the same Indian... co (©)