Although absent from the Washita battle (1868) and the Yellowstone Expedition (1873), Custer's encounters of substance with hostile Indians, Keogh did have sole responsibility for defending the Smoky Hill route against Indian raids from late 1866 to the summer of 1867. When Sheridan took over from Hancock in 1868, there is evidence that it was to Keogh he turned for first-hand information on conditions on the front line. And while with Sully's expedition later that year, Keogh was fighting Indians almost every day—indeed, it was in one such fight that his new mount, Comanche, received his first wound and, as the story goes, his name. Captain Keogh's frustration with an enemy who did not fight in a conventional manner is evident from a comment he wrote in a personal letter to his family in Ireland: