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Rangers, Mounties, And The Subjugation Of Indigenous Peoples, 1870 .. 1885, Andrew R. Graybill

Great Plains Quarterly

During the 1840s and 1850s, more than 300,000 traders and overland emigrants followed the Platte and Arkansas rivers westward across the Central Plains, the winter habitat of the bison. The rapid environmental degradation of this area had the ·effect of driving the bison to the extreme Northern and Southern Plains, where white hide-hunters slaughtered the animals.¹ By the mid-1870s indigenous peoples at both ends of the grasslands, in places such as the Texas Panhandle and the upper Missouri River valley, fiercely defended the dwindling herds in an attempt to avoid starvation.²

The Indians' predicament was not theirs alone, …