For a setting of the Indian wars some restatement of the events before 1861 is needed. By 1840 the agricultural frontier of the United States had reached the bend of the Missouri, while the Indian tribes, with plenty of room, had been pushed upon the plains. In the generation following appeared the heavy traffic along the overland trails, the advance of the frontier into the new Northwest, and the Pacific railway surveys. Each of these served to compress the Indians and restrict their range. Accompanying these came curtailing of reserves, shifting of residences to less desirable grounds, and individual maltreatment to a degree which makes marvellous the incapacity, weakness, and patience of the Indians. Occasionally they struggled, but always they lost. The scalped and mutilated pioneer, with his haystacks burning and his stock run off, is a vivid picture in the period, but is less characteristic than the long-suffering Indian, accepting the inevitable, and moving to let the white man in. The necessary results of white encroachment were destruction of game and education of the Indian to the luxuries and vices of the white man. At a time when starvation was threatening because of the disappearance of the buffalo and other food animals, he became aware of the superior diet of the whites and the ease with which robbery could be accomplished. In the fifties the pressure continued, heavier than ever. The railway surveys reached nearly every corner of the Indian Country. In the next few years came the prospectors who started hundreds of mining camps beyond the line of settlements, while the engineers began to stick the advancing heads of railways out from the Missouri frontier and into the buffalo range. Even the Indian could see the approaching end. It needed no confederate envoy to assure him that the United States could be attacked. His own hunger and the white peril were persuading him to defend his hunting-ground. Yet even now, in the widespread Indian wars of the later sixties, uniformity of action came without much previous coöperation. A general Indian league against the whites was never raised. The general war, upon dissection and analysis, breaks up into a multitude of little wars, each having its own particular causes, which, in many instances, if the word of the most expert frontiersmen is to be believed, ran back into cases of white aggression and Indian revenge.