Nearly one hundred thousand miners and hangers-on crossed the plains to the Pike's Peak country in 1859 and settled unblushingly in the midst of the Indian lands. They "possessed nothing more than the right of transit over these lands," admitted the Peace Commissioners in 1868. Yet they "took possession of them for the purpose of mining, and, against the protest of the Indians, founded cities, established farms, and opened roads. Before 1861 the Cheyenne and Arapaho had been driven from the mountain regions down upon the waters of the Arkansas, and were becoming sullen and discontented because of this violation of their rights." The treaty of 1851 had guaranteed the Indians in their possession, pledging the United States to prevent depredations by the whites, but here, as in most similar cases, the guarantees had no weight in the face of a population under way. The Indians were brushed aside, the United States agents made no real attempts to enforce the treaty, and within a few months the settlers were demanding protection against the surrounding tribes. "The Indians saw their former homes and hunting grounds overrun by a greedy population, thirsting for gold," continued the Commissioners. "They saw their game driven east to the plains, and soon found themselves the objects of jealousy and hatred. They too must go. The presence of the injured is too often painful to the wrong-doer, and innocence offensive to the eyes of guilt. It now became apparent that what had been taken by force must be retained by the ravisher, and nothing was left for the Indian but to ratify a treaty consecrating the act." Instead of a war of revenge in which the Arapaho and Cheyenne strove to defend their lands and to drive out the intruders, a war in which the United States ought to have coöperated with the Indians, a treaty of cession followed. On February 18, 1861, at Fort Wise, which was the new name for Bent's old fort on the Arkansas, an agreement was signed by which these tribes gave up much of the great range reserved for them in 1851, and accepted in its place, with what were believed to be greater guarantees, a triangular tract bounded, east and northeast, by Sand Creek, in eastern Colorado; on the south by the Arkansas and Purgatory rivers; and extending west some ninety miles from the junction of Sand Creek and the Arkansas. The cessions made by the Ute on the other side of the range, not long after this, are another part of the same story of mining aggression. The new Sand Creek reserve was designed to remove the Arapaho and Cheyenne from under the feet of the restless prospectors. For years they had kept the peace in the face of great provocation. For three years more they put up with white encroachment before their war began.