13. White buffalo hunters on Native American land increases tensions between the two groups.
War would again break out on the southern plains in 1874. Under the terms of the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867, the Cheyennes, Arapahos, Kiowas, Comanches, and Kiowa-Apaches were assigned to two reservations in the western part of the Indian Territory. Although each tribe was promised annual allocations of food and other supplies from the government, these supplies were only ever intended to supplement the hunting of buffalo on the lands to the south of the Arkansas River. Stipulated in the treaty itself was the right for the Indians to hunt “so long as the buffalo may range thereon in such numbers as to justify the chase.”
White hunters using high-powered repeating rifles had effectively exterminated the buffalo population on the central plains by the mid-1870s. The slaughter of buffalo reached its peak in 1873-1874 when an estimated seven and a half million were killed. Were the new settlers to continue on hunting as recklessly as they had done on the central plains then the inevitable extermination of the buffalo on the lands surrounding the Cheyenne-Arapahoe Reservation would threaten the very existence of the Indians themselves. Not only would the white hunters be killing their main source of food they would ultimately be confining them exclusively to their reservations where they would be completely dependent on meagre government supplies that often arrived late or sometimes not at all.