INDIAN AGENCIES ADJUSTED -- SITTING BULL'S DETERMINATION -- BAT- TLE OF WAR BONNET CREEK

Then for a few years, the work of establishing agencies and locating the Indians in places where each might better work out his destiny, without the interference or trouble making of another tribe was the duty of the war department. Early in the seventies the old Red Cloud agency was built at the Wyoming state line, on the Platte river and in a few years the new agency was established on White river. Spotted Trail was located on the Dakota state line about north of Rushville.

In 1874, Chauncey Wiltse at the head of twenty-five men, was sent out to survey the state line between Nebraska and Dakota. If there is anything that made an Indian uneasy it is a surveying party. Either they did not understand the mystery of the instrument and they thought there was something uncanny about it, or they knew that the surveying instrument presaged the coming of settlement, and the end of the wilderness. One surveying party, on the Republican, entirely disappeared. None of the equipment nor any trace of them was ever found.

Nothwithstanding Spotted Tail's avowed friendship for the whites, and his expressed opinion of the uselessness of struggling against the white race, when Wiltse's surveying party reached the vicinity of White Earth Creek, one hundred and sixty-two miles west of Keya Paha river, a number of Indian scouts

armed with Winchester rifles came to meet them, and for a pow-wow. They said that Spotted Tail did not want the line run.