Many of the citizens of that first town took their eviction with fair grace, turning to other means of employment than gold mining—and there were plenty—in Cheyenne, Denver, and the other near-by and rapidly growing settlements. One group, though, the Gordon Party, apparently enjoyed leadership of a tougher sort. They refused to be intimidated by the troops. Setting up camp on the very boundary line between the forbidden country and the permitted Platte Valley, they just waited. Actually, an increasingly large number of immigrants waited on the border only until nightfall, and then set out into the unknown. Some were apprehended by the cavalry and returned, some were killed by the sullen tribesmen, but hundreds of them managed to find their way to the vicinity of French Creek. More than that, they managed to stay. It might be thought that gold mining, with all its necessary paraphernalia, supplies, and general confusion, could not very well be carried on in an atmosphere suggesting the more modern practice of moonshining; but the truth of the matter was that there were just too many settlers and too few soldiers. Time and again the troops would swoop down on some busy little gathering and hustle the miners out to the nearest courts, where they would hastily be acquitted and released to go back to their workings. Under the very fist of forbiddance a score of towns had sprung up, among them the reborn Custer City. Finally the government gave up all hope of keeping the eager immigrants out of this last frontier. By the fall of 1875 the border towns of Sidney, Nebraska, Yankton, South Dakota, and Cheyenne and Laramie, Wyoming, were bursting at the seams with gold-hunters who demanded “their rights as citizens.” Bowing to the inevitable, the government sent a treaty commission to wait upon the Sioux. This body of earnest men offered the Indians six million dollars for the right of entry into the Hills. Although the treaty Sioux agreed to sell, the price they asked wavered between twenty and one hundred million. Crazy Horse, who did not attend the council, refused to sell at any price and solemnly warned the white man to stay out. Frustrated, the treaty commissioners returned to Washington in despair, while the embittered Sioux disappeared into the west river country to nurse their grievances. Upon this turn of affairs, the government washed its hands of the matter and opened the lands to settlement. That was in June of 1875. Within a matter of weeks after the bars had been let down, the Hills were populated by uncounted thousands of men, women, and children. Many simply came out of the woods to claim honestly the diggings they had been working dishonestly; but many, many more came from the East by every train, now that the country was legitimately open.