9. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs proposes the establishment of two large reservations to facilitate safe western migration for white settlers
It was becoming clear to the government that in order to facilitate western migration, the Concentration policy would have to redefined if it was to succeed. Nathaniel G. Taylor, the newly appointed Commissioner of Indian Affairs, proposed a possible solution to the Indian question in 1867. Taylor advocated the establishment of two large reservations for all the tribes of the plains, one south of Kansas, the other north of Nebraska. With the tribes confined upon the two reservations, the area between would allow for the safe migration of white settlers heading westward.
In October 1867 a seven-man “peace commission” which included Commissioner Taylor and General Sherman met with representatives of the southern plains tribes – the Kiowas, Kiowa-Apaches, Comanches, Southern Cheyennes, and Arapahos – at Medicine Lodge, Kansas. In exchange for the cession of their lands and consent to live peacefully on reservations, tribes would be allowed to continue to hunt buffalo off the reservation and would receive annual allocations of food and supplies for thirty years. Most of the major leaders of the southern plains tribes signed the treaty.
Negotiations with the northern tribes would not be as straightforward. Only after the government had agreed to close the Bozeman Trail, (the main route for whites to the Montana goldfields, but which also passed through the Sioux’s prime buffalo-hunting ground) and to dismantle all the forts that protected it, would Red Cloud, the leader of the Oglala add his signature to the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. Others, such as Sitting Bull, the Hunkpapa Chief, refused to recognize the right of the government to confine their people upon reservations. Sitting Bull, in fact, described Red Cloud and the other leaders who signed treaties with the United States as “rascals…[who] sold our country without the full consent of our people.”