The Sioux uprising of 1862 came a little ahead of the general wars, with causes rising from the treaties of Mendota and Traverse des Sioux in 1851. The plains situation had been clearly seen and succinctly stated in this year. "We are constrained to say," wrote the men who made these treaties, "that in our opinion _the time has come_ when the extinguishment of the Indian title to this region should no longer be delayed, if government would not have the mortification, on the one hand, of confessing its inability to protect the Indian from encroachment; or be subject to the painful necessity, upon the other, of ejecting by force thousands of its citizens from a land which they desire to make their homes, and which, without their occupancy and labor, will be comparatively useless and waste." The other treaties concluded in this same year at Fort Laramie were equally the fountains of discontent which boiled over in the early sixties and gave rise at last to one of the most horrible incidents of the plains war. In the Laramie treaties the first serious attempt to partition the plains among the tribes was made. The lines agreed upon recognized existing conditions to a large extent, while annuities were pledged in consideration of which the savages agreed to stay at peace, to allow free migration along the trails, and to keep within their boundaries. The Sioux here agreed that they belonged north of the Platte. The Arapaho and Cheyenne recognized their area as lying between the Platte and the Arkansas, the mountains and, roughly, the hundred and first meridian. For ten years after these treaties the last-named tribes kept the faith to the exclusion of attacks upon settlers or emigrants. They even allowed the Senate in its ratification of the treaty to reduce the term of the annuities from fifty years to fifteen. In a way, the Arapaho and Cheyenne Indians lay off the beaten tracks and apart from contact with the whites. Their home was in the triangle between the great trails, with a mountain wall behind them that offered almost insuperable obstacles to those who would cross the continent through their domain. The Gunnison railroad survey, which was run along the thirty-ninth parallel and through the Cochetopa Pass, revealed the difficulty of penetrating the range at this point. Accordingly, a decade which built up Oregon and California made little impression on this section until in 1858 gold was discovered in Cherry Creek. Then came the deluge.