Changes

== Enabling Treaty Violations ==

Hunting buffalo had become a wildly popular means by which to make a living and the number of hunters pouring into Dodge City grew at an exponential rate. Renowned hunter William “Billy” Dixon wrote that “During the fall and winter of 1872 and 1873, there were more hunters in the country than ever before…I feel safe in saying that 75,000 buffaloes were killed within sixty or seventy-five miles of Dodge.”<ref>Frederick S. Barde,'' Life and Adventures of “Billy” Dixon of Adobe Walls, Panhandle, Texas'' (Guthrie, OK: Cooperative Publishing Co., 1914), 109-110.</ref>The result of such voracious hunting was the decimation of the animal north of the Arkansas River.

The white men inched their way down through Kansas and into Indian Territory one river at a time. The initial southern hunting boundary of the Medicine Lodge Treaty was the Arkansas River; what the hunters called the “Dead Line.” After crossing the Arkansas, they moved in order to the Cimarron, Canadian, and finally the Red River. The U.S. Army turned the other way when they saw the trespassing, hunting, and poaching of what, by treaty, belonged to the Native Americans. By 1873, the tribal leaders realized they were unable to prevent the hunters from infringing on their territory, thus they elected to remain on the reservations rather than hunt on their own land. Factions within tribes began to quarrel as most sought peace while a growing number of war chiefs and young warriors began to emerge. Actions of the hunters exacerbated the path to war in 1873 when they scouted the Texas panhandle.