With jurisdiction divided, and with claimants for it quarrelling, it is no wonder that the charges suffered. But the ill results came more from the impossible situation than from abuse on either side. It needs often to be reiterated that the heart of the Indian question was in the infiltration of greedy, timorous, enterprising, land-hungry whites who could not be restrained by any process known to American government. In the conflict between two civilizations, the lower must succumb. Neither the War Department nor the Indian Office was responsible for most of the troubles; yet of the two, the former, through readiness to fight and to hold the savage to a standard of warfare which he could not understand, was the greater offender. It was not so great an offender, however, as the selfish interests of those engaged in trading with the Indians would make it out to be. The Fort Sully conference, terminating in a treaty signed on October 10, 1865, was distinctly unsatisfactory. Many of the western Sioux did not come at all. Even the eastern were only partially represented. And among tribes in which the central authority of the chiefs was weak, full representation was necessary to secure a binding peace. The commissioners, after most pacific efforts, were "unable to ascertain the existence of any really amicable feeling among these people towards the government." The chiefs were sullen and complaining, and the treaty which resulted did little more than repeat the terms of the treaty of 1851, binding the Indians to permit roads to be opened through their country and to keep away from the trails. It is difficult to show that the northern Sioux were bound by the treaty of Fort Sully. The Laramie treaty of 1851 had never had full force of law because the Senate had added amendments to it, which all the signatory Indians had not accepted. Although Congress had appropriated the annuities specified in the treaty the binding force of the document was not great on savages. The Fort Sully treaty was deficient in that it did not represent all of the interested tribes. In making Indian treaties at all, the United States acted upon a convenient fiction that the Indians had authorities with power to bind; whereas the leaders had little control over their followers and after nearly every treaty there were many bands that could claim to have been left out altogether. Yet such as they were, the treaties existed, and the United States proceeded in 1865 and 1866 to use its specified rights in opening roads through the hunting-grounds of the Sioux.