You may have to look around to find it, but I urge you to get Henry M. Stanley's account of his 1867 trip across the Plains.
I absolutely love reading the diaries, journals, and other firsthand accounts of people who traveled to and through the Old West. My copy of Stanley's fascinating account of his travels with U.S. Army troops and the early Indian Wars is an old paperback edition published in 1982 by the University of Nebraska Press as part of their Bison Books history series. The title of the book is "My Early Travels and Adventures in America."
If you know who Henry M. Stanley was, you probably associate him more with Africa than the American West. He's the one who uttered the famous "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" line when he trekked into Africa looking for the famous missionary explorer, David Livingstone. Stanley himself was an explorer/adventurer/news correspondent originally from Wales. He came to the U.S. as a youngster and was "adopted," either formally or by association, by a New Orleans merchant who sort of sponsored him and got him into his life of adventure and news reporting.
Get a copy of Stanley's book. It's a fascinating firsthand account of a turbulent time on the post-Civil War Plains. You'll enjoy it, and you're bound to learn a thing or two about soldiers, settlers, and the Indian Wars of the 1860s-'70s.
