The summer of 1850 brought even greater crowds along the trail to California, and the scanty rainfall that year made the pasture problem more acute. Although this summer marked the peak of the gold rush to California, a succession of rich gold and silver strikes throughout the northwest and in Colorado and Nevada brought treasure hunters in large numbers for the next fifteen years. Farmers eager for new lands and hoping to raise food for the new mining towns, and many other settlers looking for adventure or a new life in the west, swelled the ranks.
Stage and freight lines were established to carry people and supplies to the boom towns. With these vehicles moving both west and east, the trail was busy until late October. Year by year the Platte Valley became a place for buffalo to avoid at all seasons.
Friction between the Indians along the trail and the intruding whites increased greatly with the increased travel, and demands were made that the army send troops to protect the travelers. At the same time Indian problems in several other areas were demanding attention from federal officials.
Until 1849 all Indian affairs had been handled by the army through the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the Department of War. It was decided to replace the military control with civilian officials under the new Department of the Interior, in hopes that these new men could take a broader, long-range view of the problem.
The major source of trouble for travelers in the buffalo country was the roving war parties of various tribes going forth to raid their enemies. The Indians were out for glory and loot, and any depredations they might commit on the hunting grounds of another tribe should, by Indian logic, be charged against that tribe, whose duty it was to police its own lands. Hence Indians who would be peaceful and friendly toward whites visiting the tribal villages felt free to raid the same whites later on when they had passed onto lands claimed by another tribe. Even in lands claimed by no tribe, disgruntled warriors returning from an unsuccessful raid might plunder a small train rather than go home empty-handed.
The Indian Bureau decided to ask each tribe to delineate the boundaries of its tribal lands, then promise to stay within those boundaries. If the Indians agreed, this would put a stop to the roving war parties, and would reveal large areas of land claimed by no tribe, open to all travel at no risk. As far as possible, trails would be routed through the unclaimed spaces. When a route had to cross tribal land, a yearly payment could be made for the use of the trail and for the land necessary to establish a few army posts along the way.
To implement this plan, the old fur trader and mountain man Thomas ("Broken Hand") Fitzpatrick was sent to Fort Laramie in 1851. There he held a great council with all the buffalo hunters of the northern plains from Canada to the Arkansas River and west to the continental divide in Wyoming and Montana. The Indians came in by the thousandsSioux and Cheyenne, Crow, Arapahoe and Gros Ventre, Wind River Shoshoni, and even remnants of the once powerful Arikara.
The Crows objected when the Sioux claimed the Powder River country, which had been Crow hunting grounds for a century or more until the Sioux moved west in force a decade earlier. For the rest, the boundaries were rather easily set, with Fitzpatrick attempting no objections or adjustments. At the end of the council all the tribes had concluded treaties. So successful was this council that several others were held throughout the west, and similar treaties were negotiated with most of the western tribes.
Treaties signed at Fort Laramie made traveling much safer for the white men in the lands of the Sioux, northern Cheyenne, and northern Arapahoe. The peaceful interlude lasted about eight years, and may be illustrated by a brief account of an elaborate hunting expedition conducted by an Irish nobleman, Sir St. George Gore, who spent three years on the plains with buffalo as his chief quarry while some of his companions made scientific observations on the fauna and flora.
In the spring of 1854 Gore assembled a large party at Fort Leavenworth, well equipped for a lengthy stay away from the settlements. He had about seventy-five rifles of many sizes and kinds, most of them made to order, and twelve shotguns for birds and small game. He took along about fifty good riding horses for running buffalo, and a large pack of greyhounds and staghounds to chase wolves, coyotes, and antelope. Seventy-four horses, mules, and oxen hauled the twenty-one carts and six large wagons with the supplies and gear, and three milk cows trailed along to provide the milk and butter.
After a leisurely trip up the Platte River, Gore spent the fall hunting on the slopes of the Colorado Rockies, returning to Fort Laramie for the winter. Here he met Jim Bridger and hired him to be his chief guide. In the spring Bridger led the party north to Powder River and on down to the Yellowstone. A fort for the coming winter was built on the Tongue River, but Gore and Bridger preferred to live a few miles away near the Yellowstone where grass for the horses was very good and the hunting excellent. They went out nearly every day with their horses and dogs and killed a great deal of game of many kinds.
Some fuss was made by the Indians that the white men were wasting a great deal of meat by killing so many animals for trophies. Gore's total of 2,000 buffalo is imposing, but this covered a period of three years, and his party of fifty, with their large pack of hunting dogs, could eat the meat from several hundred animals in that time. It is probable that the Gore party had a higher rate of usage for their game than most sportsmen in the west, and about as good as any band of Indians over a like period.
Summer and winter, Gore hunted nearly every day and brought in plenty of game, although his daily hunting schedule was something of a scandal to an old mountain man who liked to be out at the crack of dawn and have the day's work taken care of by dark. Gore slept until midmorning, then ate a leisurely breakfast about eleven or twelve o'clock. Rested and fed, he started out about midday, and it might be long after dark before he got back to camp with his trophies.
In his snug tent at night Gore would often read to Bridger from Shakespeare or Baron Münchhausen. Jim allowed that the obese Falstaff drank too much beer and that he would have done much better by taking the same amount of alcohol in whisky. Jim did not believe everything the baron wrote, although he did say that some of his own exploits with the Blackfeet might seem as wild if put into a book.
Gore spent three years in the Indian country, more than a year of it in the Powder River area, which was such a trouble spot during the next two decades, and reported no trouble from any of the tribes he met, a record for which Jim Bridger deserves much of the credit, but at least some part of the peaceful conditions of this period, 1854-57, resulted directly from the council at Fort Laramie.
Michel Pablo surveys his buffalo rounded up for shipment to Canada. In 1900 more than 80 percent of the buffalo in the United States could be traced to the herd Pablo and Charles Allard had bought and raised. (Montana Historical Society, photo by N. A. Forsyth)
When the U.S. refused to buy the Pablo herd, he shipped it for sale to the Canadian government. Driving and loading the buffalo was a wild and woolly affair, but this stubborn bull finally met his end. (Montana Historical Society, photo by N. A. Forsyth)
17. Comanche Wars for the Southern Buffalo Range
''The Comanche men are short and stout… on foot they are slow and awkward, but on horseback graceful."
"The men are about medium stature, with bright, copper-colored complexions and intelligent countenances, in many instances with aquiline noses, thin lips, black eyes and hair, with but little beard."