The Plains Indians--the Sioux, the Cheyennes, the Arapahos, the Kiowas, the Comanches--had fought hard, during the war of the white men in the East, to clear their hunting grounds; but when in 1866 the Civil War had ended they found that the Americans were pressing forward more strongly than ever. Two iron roads were being surveyed through the buffalo country; new gold fields, in Montana, were being opened and a white man's wagon-road, protected by forts, was being laid out to reach them by a short cut through Wyoming. With two thousand of his Oglala Sioux, Chief Red Cloud undertook to close this wagon-road; and close it he did. He beleaguered new Fort Phil Kearney in northern Wyoming, wiped out one detachment of eighty-one men, attacked other detachments, cut off the supplies from all the forts, stood firmly in the path; and in 1868 the United States Government agreed to withdraw all soldiers and leave the country to the Sioux.[1] But the iron trails continued. There were the Union Pacific in the north, the Kansas Pacific on the south. The first drove its stakes and laid its rails along the great white wagon-road of the Oregon Trail and the Overland Trail, which already had split the buffalo herds. The Sioux and the Northern Cheyennes fought it in Nebraska, they fought it in Wyoming; until in 1868 it still had not been stopped, it was lunging on straight for the mountains, and in the treaty that promised him the hunting grounds north of it Chief Red Cloud also promised to let it alone. The Cheyennes, their allies from the Sioux and the Arapahos, made no such promise regarding the Kansas Pacific. The Union Pacific "thunder wagons" had divided the buffalo into the northern and the southern herds; now the southern herd was to be divided again. A line of forts was creeping on; the soldiers were increasing; and the "thunder wagons" were to travel back and forth between the Missouri River and Denver, frightening the buffalo that grazed in central Kansas, and bringing in hunters to kill them. "If the road does not stop," said Chief Roman Nose of the Cheyennes, "I shall be the white man's enemy forever." By the fall of 1868 the rails had reached four hundred and twelve miles, almost clear across northern Kansas, to Fort Wallace near the border of Colorado. Every mile of the last two hundred and more had been a fight; wellnigh every mile of these same had been stained red; all western Kansas was a battle ground, upon which settlers, soldiers, surveyors and track-builders gave up their lives. The Cheyennes lost heavily, but they showed no signs of quitting. They were getting worse.