It is worth saying that the hunters were on Indian land illegally. Everything south of the Arkansas River in Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, was the province of the Indians, by Treaty. The hunters supposedly had a "wink-and-nod" agreement with the commander of Fort Dodge to cross the river and hunt in Indian Territory...which they had already been doing down quite a ways south of Dodge City, already even into Texas, but not as far south as the Walls. The hunters had decimated the herds that far north though, by the end of 1873 and had to go into hostile territory to continue the slaughter. The Army, of course, wanted this in order to deprive the hostile bands of their source of food and force them onto the reservation at Fort Sill. The hunters were competitive with each other, but also moved south in-force, banded loosely together for self-preservation. All these actions resulted in the Red River War which ended with the subjugation of the southern Plains tribes.
