After the Crows secured horses and guns, their hunting in the Yellowstone Valley increased. At the same time Blackfeet coming up the Missouri to Three Forks and the Columbia Basin tribes moving across from upper Clarks Fork pushed more and more animals south into Idaho, replacing the buffalo there as fast as they were being killed by the mounted Shoshoni and Bannocks. But after the smallpox epidemic of 1837 the Blackfeet stopped coming. The Crows could hunt more to the north. The new herds no longer came across Bozeman Pass, and some of those in the Three Forks area were pushed back by the increased hunting by the Columbia Basin tribes coming into the basin from the northwest.
In a few years the buffalo had all been cleared from the country west of the divide, and the Shoshoni and Bannocks had to travel far to hunt. Then the herds left the Three Forks country, and all the western hunters had to go to the central plains of Montana to find their game. The weakened Blackfeet were forced back toward Canada by the large bands of organized Columbia Basin hunters and had to allow the intruders to hunt even along the Sun River and in the Judith Basin.
During this period of change, in an unrelated development, the Blackfeet also changed some of their hunting practices, the most striking change being the abandonment of the piskin. It was abandoned, just as it was instituted, as the result of a dream.
In 1843 the Piegan band of Blackfeet was camped north of the Teton River, where they had built a strong piskin of the old type, a corral of timber just below a small cutbank in a coulee. After a successful drive in which 181 buffalo were trapped and killed, the camp was aroused in the night to find the piskin in flames. Then their buffalo caller, who had lured the herd to destruction the day before, stepped forth and confessed that he had deliberately destroyed the piskin, built with so much labor and in such a fine location. Early in the night a vision had come to him. His spirit had left his body and had traveled to a strange valley where a large buffalo bull approached him from some trees. The man and the bull exchanged peace signs, then the bull gave the buffalo caller a solemn warning that he and his people would suffer greatly if they continued to use the piskin, as it was too destructive.
When his spirit returned to his body, the man awoke. He knew he must burn the piskin at once and must persuade his people never to use one again. When he finished his story, the people agreed that the man was right to obey his vision, and forgave him for burning the piskin. This is rather dramatic evidence that some of the Indians along the fringes of the buffalo country were starting to worry over the absence of the herds from their old haunts. After this incident the Blackfeet moved much of their hunting to the north, around the Sweet Grass Hills, where they hunted from horseback.
Once the Blackfoot pressure had eased in central Montana, the Nez Percé and Flatheads used the short trail to the buffalo, from the Bitterroot Valley up the Big Blackfoot River and across Cadotte's Pass. Once on the east slope of the Sun River they engaged in sporadic fighting with the Blackfeet and kept this portion of Montana in a turmoil, to the detriment of the fur traders. It also closed the easy route west from Fort Benton to most travelers.
In 1853 when General Isaac Stevens traveled west to assume his duties as governor of the newly created Washington Territory, he was expected to survey a route for a possible railroad and to meet with the various Indian tribes along the way to arrange for future treaty councils, following the pattern developed at Fort Laramie in 1851. The trouble spot on the Sun River was one Stevens had to pass through.
When Stevens met with the Blackfoot chiefs and suggested a permanent peace settlement between their tribe and the western group, they were interested. They explained that the western tribes had come across the mountains and started the fights, and had forced the Blackfeet from some of their land. The Blackfeet were careful not to mention the many small raids they carried on against the Flathead villages across the divide, a practice they continued for the next two years.
In October 1855, Governor Stevens finally assembled delegations from the Flathead, Pend d'Oreille, and Nez Percé at the mouth of the Judith River, and a lasting peace with the Blackfeet was arranged. The Blackfeet agreed that the western tribes could hunt unmolested south of the Musselshell River and that the Blackfeet would stay north of that river. This reserved the Judith Basin for the Blackfeet, but western hunters often ranged there with tacit Blackfoot approval.
With the signing of this treaty and the resulting improvement in their relations with the Blackfeet, the Columbia Basin tribes stepped up their buffalo hunting, and the annual kill in this area, but the herds were not forced away from the Belt Mountains, for the Sioux at the same time were increasing their pressure on the herds from the east in Dakota. The triangle of the Montana plains between the Missouri and the Yellowstone as far west as the Belt Mountains continued as the home grounds of the northern buffalo herd until its complete destruction in 1883.
Meanwhile, on the eastern fringe the buffalo had no respite from the westward-moving farm frontier, even though the government's new Indian policy and new treaties eased tensions between red man and white. The course of national events kept the whole plains area in a state of constant flux, with steady pressure on the buffalo around the entire perimeter of the Great Plains crowding the herds toward the center. Corridors were opened up through the heart of the buffalo country from east to west, especially from the farmlands in eastern Kansas to the new mining camps in the Colorado mountains, a prelude to the later complete separation of the southern and northern herds.
The first large westward movement of farmers came in Kansas, against the heartland of the southern herd, which had its greatest concentration in the drainage basin of the Republican River. When slavery and antislavery forces clashed in Kansas, each side tried to outdo the other in rushing partisans to the territory, pushing the farming frontier westward about sixty miles in two years and crowding out the local Indians, who were forced from their small garden patches and villages and had to move south into Indian Territory. Although the new farmers spent most of their time and effort opposing one another, they effectively drove the buffalo from a wide belt of fine grassland that the herds had used for spring pasture.
Among the displaced Indian tribes the Pawnees suffered the most. As farms encroached on their lands, game became scarce and they finally gave up the struggle, surrendering almost all of their reservation and all their hunting grounds. The Indian Bureau moved them south into Indian Territory, displacing other tribes there to make way for the newcomers, who had to accept a much smaller reservation with poorer land than their former holdings, and had disgruntled neighbors besides.
As the conflict between pro- and anti-slavery forces died down in Kansas, the new settlers moved on up the valley of the Kansas River as far as Smoky Hill Fork, with a few scattered land claims farther west for about fifty miles. The frontier appeared to settle down for a time, but in 1858 it was stirred up again by reports of an important gold strike on Cherry Creek north of Pike's Peak. Small amounts of gold dust soon reached Kansas City, and the news received banner headlines in the papers. Excited people, hoping for another treasure spot like California, came rushing into towns all along the Missouri from Kansas City to Omaha to outfit for the 600-mile journey across the plains to the new mines. Each little village put forth its advantages as the jumping-off place. A letter to an Omaha paper commented:
It is interesting to look over the papers published at different towns on the Missouri, below Omaha. Every town that can boast three houses, a well and a smoke house, are showing up their advantages as a place for outfitting; most of them have a military road leading to the mines, each one shorter than its neighborsome of them save about one-half the distance. Well, now, that may be well enough, if they can make it.