Red River War - Background

Background

Prior to the arrival of English American settlers on the Great Plains, the Comanche and other tribes lived a wide ranging nomadic existence. Beginning in the 1830s significant numbers of permanent settlements were established in what had previously been the exclusive territory of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Attacks, raids, and counter-raids occurred frequently. Prior to the Civil War, the U.S. Army was only sporadically involved in these frontier conflicts, manning forts but only occasionally striking outside of them. During the Civil War, the military withdrew almost completely and Indian raids increased dramatically.

After the war, the military began reasserting itself along the frontier. The Medicine Lodge Treaty, signed near present day Medicine Lodge, KS in 1867, called for two reservations to be set aside in Indian Territory, one for the Comanche and Kiowa and one for the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho. According to the treaty, the government would provide the tribes with housing, agricultural training, and food and other supplies. In exchange, the Indians agreed to cease raiding and attacking settlements. Dozens of chiefs endorsed the treaty and some tribal members moved voluntarily to the reservations, but it was never officially ratified and several groups of Indians still on the Plains didn't even attend the negotiations. The treaty was widely ignored.

In 1870, a new technique for tanning buffalo hides became commercially available. In response, commercial hunters began systematically targeting buffalo for the first time. Once numbering in the tens of millions, the buffalo population plummeted. By 1878 they would be all but extinct.

The destruction of the buffalo herds was a disaster for the Plains Indians, on and off the reservations. The entire nomadic way of life had been based around the animals. They were used for food, fuel and construction materials. Without abundant buffalo, the Plains Indians had no means of self support.

By the winter of 1873-1874, the Plains Indians were in crisis. The reduction of the buffalo herds to unthinkably low levels combined with ever increasing numbers of new settlers and more aggressive military patrols had put them in an unsustainable position.