Opening the Iron Trail by Edwin L. Sabin

IT was a tremendous large party. In fact, it looked like a regular military excursion, instead of a survey trip, when in the early morning it moved out from new Julesburg (the "roaring town" was dead tired at this hour) and headed northwest up Lodge Pole Creek by the old Overland Stage road on the Oregon Trail.

There were two companies, B and M, of the Second Cavalry, from Fort McPherson, commanded by Captain (or Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel) J. K. Mizner and First Lieutenant James N. Wheelan, to ride the country and guard the long train of supply wagons. There was Surgeon Henry B. Terry, of the army medical corps -- a slender, black-moustached, active man in major's shoulder-straps. There were the teamsters and farriers and wagoners and cooks and what-not.