At last he reluctantly sent for the quartermaster, and ordered him to have a span of good mules hitched to a light spring-wagon.

The wagon was driven to the post-trader’s store, where I found my guide and interpreter, and loaded aboard the presents I had bought for the old warrior.  With plenty of robes to keep out the intense cold, we started out on our journey, a little apprehensive, but fully determined to go through with it.  Five or six miles from the Post we met three men in a wagon driving toward the Agency.  They told us that Sitting Bull’s camp had been lately moved, and that it was now further down the river.  I knew that if the old man was really on the warpath he would be moving up the river, not down, so I felt considerably reassured.

When we had proceeded a few miles further we heard a yell behind us, and, looking back, saw a rider approaching at full speed.  This proved to be one of Major McLaughlin’s Indian scouts.  He bore a telegram reading: 

    COLONEL WILLIAM F. CODY, Fort Yates, N.D.: 

    The order for the detention of Sitting Bull has been rescinded. 
    You are hereby ordered to return to Chicago and report to General
    Miles.

    BENJAMIN HARRISON, President.

That ended my mission to Sitting Bull.  I still believe I could have got safely through the country, though there were plenty of chances that I would be killed or wounded in the attempt.

I returned to the Post, turned back my presents at a loss to myself, and paid the interpreter fifty dollars for his day’s work.  He was very glad to have the fifty and a whole skin, for he could not figure how the five hundred would be of much help to him if he had been stretched out on the Plains with an Indian bullet through him.

I was supplied with conveyance back to Mandan by Colonel Brown and took my departure the next morning.  Afterward, in Indianapolis, President Harrison informed me that he had allowed himself to be persuaded against my mission in opposition to his own judgment, and said he was very sorry that he had not allowed me to proceed.

It developed afterward that the people who had moved the President to interfere consisted of a party of philanthropists who advanced the argument that my visit would precipitate a war in which Sitting Bull would be killed, and it was to spare the life of this man that I was stopped!

The result of the President’s order was that the Ghost Dance War followed very shortly, and with it came the death of Sitting Bull.

I found that General Miles knew exactly why I had been turned back from my trip to Sitting Bull.  But he was a soldier, and made no criticism of the order of a superior.  General Miles was glad to hear that I had been made a brigadier-general, but he was still more pleased with the fact that I knew so many Indians at the Agency.

“You can get around among them,” he said, “and learn their intentions better than any other man I know.”