href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@36066@[email protected]#fig7" class="pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">7), Stieffel went in the field, for what appears to have been the last time, as a member of a wagon-train escort to Medicine Bluff, Indian Territory (present day Oklahoma), where General Sheridan was establishing Fort Sill on the southern edge of the Wichita Mountains.[17] This picturesque overhang of Medicine Bluff Creek, a small tributary of the Red River, was the subject of one of Stieffel's landscapes and perhaps his finest single work (fig. 5).

Figure 5.—The Wichita Mountains from Medicine Bluffs, Indian Territory. (USNM 384188; Smithsonian photo 42880.)

After this brief interlude in the wilderness, Stieffel went back to his hospital work. Then in September 1873, following a change of station for Company K from Harker to Fort Leavenworth, he went in desertion until the following May, being restored to duty upon his return, rather strangely, without trial but with loss of pay for the period of his absence.[18] The only possible explanation for this leniency in a period when court-martial sentences tended to severity could be that since extra-duty men had to be furnished, Stieffel was worth more to the company out of the stockade than in. With Indian unrest increasing every man counted.[19]

Figure 6.—Fort Harker, Kansas; east side. (USNM 384187; Smithsonian photo 42895.)

Following the Custer massacre on June 25, 1876, all posts in the Department of the Missouri were virtually stripped of troops, among them the 5th Infantry, and dispatched to the Department of Dakota in an all-out attempt to bring the rampaging Sioux under control. But Stieffel saw no action in the campaigns that followed. He was sick[20] and was left behind on July 12 when Company K left Leavenworth for the northwest for five years of almost continuous campaigning including numerous actions with the Sioux and the campaign against the gifted Indian tactician, Chief Joseph, and his Nez Percé. We could wish that Stieffel had been present during the Nez Percé campaign, for he might have pictured for us Nelson Miles and the 5th Infantry taking the surrender of Joseph in the Bear Paw Mountains at the end of his epochal 1,600-mile running fight.[21]

Stieffel remained at Fort Leavenworth until 1877 when he rejoined his regiment at Cantonment Tongue River, Montana Territory, renamed Fort Keogh in 1879. At Keogh he was again placed on hospital extra-duty and so remained until he was discharged June 23, 1882,[22] on a surgeon's certificate of disability. After his discharge he retired to the Soldier's Home in Washington where he died on December 14, 1886, at the age of 60. He was buried in the National Cemetery on the Soldiers' Home grounds.[23]

Stieffel painted three scenes of Fort Keogh and vicinity—one of the fort itself, one of Miles City across the Tongue River, and a landscape of the Yellowstone River near Miles City (figs. 8-10).

The Paintings

Chronologically, the first of the paintings (fig. 2) is that of the Indian attack on General Marcy's train escorted by Company K on September 23, 1867. This attack took place on the Arkansas River about nine miles west of Cimarron Crossing, Kansas. It was an insignificant action as such, similar to hundreds of other such fights in the West, but, in the days of wet-plate photography and low-speed camera shutters, the painting is significant as a rare eye-witness drawing and tells us far more than might any written description. General Marcy's report is somewhat cursory:

Stieffel tells us much more in his painting. Upon being attacked the train has pulled off the road, visible in the left foreground, and corralled. The horses remain hitched, witness to the suddenness of the attack. That the Indians did not venture overly close, as stated by Marcy, is indicated by the fact that Brotherton's men have not been forced to