The fight at Fort Philip Kearney marked a point of transition in Indian warfare. Even here the Indians were mostly armed with bows and arrows, and were relying upon their superior numbers for victory. Yet a change in Indian armament was under way, which in a few years was to convert the Indian from a savage warrior into the "finest natural soldier in the world." He was being armed with rifles. As the game diminished the tribes found that the old methods of hunting were inadequate and began the pressure upon the Indian Department for better weapons. The department justified itself in issuing rifles and ammunition, on the ground that the laws of the United States expected the Indians to live chiefly upon game, which they could not now procure by the older means. Hence came the anomalous situation in which one department of the United States armed and equipped the tribes for warfare against another. If arms were cut down, the tribes were in danger of extinction; if they were issued, hostilities often resulted. After the Fetterman massacre the Indian Office asserted that the hostile Sioux were merely hungry, because the War Department had caused the issuing of guns to be stopped. It was all an unsolvable problem, with bad temper and suspicion on both sides. A few months after the Fetterman affair Red Cloud tried again to wreck a wood train near Fort Philip Kearney. But this time the escort erected a barricade with the iron, bullet-proof bodies of a new variety of army wagon, and though deserted by most of his men, Major James Powell, with one other officer, twenty-six privates, and four citizens, lay behind their fortification and repelled charge after charge from some 800 Sioux and Cheyenne. With little loss to himself he inflicted upon the savages a lesson that lasted many years. The Sioux and Cheyenne wars were links in the chain of Indian outbreaks that stretched across the path of the westward movement, the overland traffic and the continental railways. The Pacific railways had been chartered just as the overland telegraph had been opened to the Pacific coast. With this last, perhaps from reverence for the nearly supernatural, the Indians rarely meddled. But as the railway advanced, increasing compression and repression stirred the tribes to a series of hostilities. The first treaties which granted transit--meaning chiefly wagon transit--broke down. A new series of conferences and a new policy were the direct result of these wars. CHAPTER XVII THE PEACE COMMISSION AND THE OPEN WAY