Bill Merrick

From The Buffalo Soldier and the Cheyenne Girl:

April 14, 1867
At midday, a mile-long battle line of three hundred Indians, most of them Southern Cheyenne from a warrrior society known as the Dog Soldiers, stood in silent splendor, blocking the advance of Major General Winfield Scott Hancock's cavalry and artillery from Fort Larned, Kansas. Though outnumbered four to one and outgunned, the braves vowed to protect their women and children encamped on the north side of Pawnee Fork, near the Arkansas River and Santa Fe Trail. They carried breech-loading rifles and revolvers, but were always short of ammunition. For this reason, they still depended on lances and bows and quivers full of arrows. In the central Great Plains--western Kansas and eastern Colorado Territory--they were the last desperate holdouts to white civilization.
Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, who witnessed the event, later described it as "one of the finest and most imposing military displays, prepared according to the Indian art of war, which it has ever been my lot to behold."