Fort Sill

In January of the same year, 18 mules were stolen from the quartermaster's corral at that same post.

The same year, 1870, while Colonel Grierson was building Fort Sill in the Indian Territory, Chief Kickingbird, a Kiowa, defeated the command of Captain C.B. McClellan near the present town of Seymour.

As late as March of 1872, a wagon train was waylaid near Grierson Springs in Reagan County and the teamsters killed by the Indians.

Two companies of the 9th Cavalry came upon the scene by accident, engaged the Indians, but withdrew before a decision was reached.

Two months later, in May, Colonel McKenzie roused his 4th Cavalry at Fort Richardson and set out to obey General Sherman's orders issued after the killing of the teamsters at Salt Creek.

But it began to rain.

After a futile chase, Colonel McKenzie headed for Fort Sill, commanded by Colonel Benjamin H. Grierson.

There he learned that Sherman had left, but not before the chiefs Satank, Sitting Bear, Big Tree, and Satanta, White Bear, had returned to the reservation at Sill and boasted of murdering the teamsters.

Ooh.

When they put me under anesthesia, I was in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and I was having a surgery done on my mouth, and they had me on this table.

And they said, "We want you to count backwards from 10."

Yeah.

But I would not give up.

So we worked on down the stream toward the Fort Sill cattle trail, traveling on an average twenty miles a day on foot, with the record nothing in my notebook night after night.

But on the eleventh of February, after forty days of unceasing effort, I discovered below the forks of the Big Wichita a somewhat different horizon from that of the beds over which I had been working so persistently without success.

Some of the beds in this region are composed of red clay, with small irregular concretions that are piled in heaps at the base of the hills and roll under one's feet, rendering travel difficult.

The hills rapidly dried as the thick red water sought the drainage canals, and we were soon at work once more.

more.As a precaution against the very difficulty which I had encountered I mean the impossibility of keeping a man and team with me I had obtained from the Secretary of War through the efforts of Professor Alexander Agassiz a letter of introduction to the commanders of western posts requesting them to assist me by every means in their power not inconsistent with the public service.

With this letter from the Honorable Robert T. Lincoln a son of our martyred President I started out on the 12th of March for Fort Sill on a pony hired from a livery stable.

I was assured that it was only sixty miles to the fort and that the pony could easily take me there in a day but I soon found that he was just off grass and weak and thin.

He's a, he's a great entry point to the acquisition world.

But just as, as leaders in the field artillery, the command sergeant major and I, we have a good running dialogue with the commandant of the field artillery out at, uh, Fort Sill, and then of course, other elements across the enterprise w-where we're able to provide some feedback, 'cause I will say the Army enterprise from the Pentagon, you know, all the way out through the acquisition field is they're always interested in getting war fighter feedback.

And so we provide it as much as we possibly can.

How's drone warfare affecting field artillery w- writ large in your ability to project combat power at distance?