The crisis in the struggle for the control of the great plains may fairly be said to have been reached about the time of the slaughter of Fetterman and his men at Fort Philip Kearney. During the previous fifteen years the causes had been shaping through the development of the use of the trails, the opening of the mining territories, and the agitation for a continental railway. Now the railway was not only authorized and begun, but Congress had put a premium upon its completion by an act of July, 1866, which permitted the Union Pacific to build west and the Central Pacific to build east until the two lines should meet. In the ensuing race for the land grants the roads were pushed with new vigor, so that the crisis of the Indian problem was speedily reached. In the fall of 1866 Ben Holladay saw the end of the overland freighting and sold out. In November the terminus of the overland mail route was moved west to Fort Kearney, Nebraska, whither the Union Pacific had now arrived in its course of construction. No wonder the tribes realized their danger and broke out in protest. As the crisis drew near radical differences of opinion among those who must handle the tribes became apparent. The question of the management by the War Department or the Interior was in the air, and was raised again and again in Congress. More fundamental was the question of policy, upon which the view of Senator John Sherman was as clear as any. "I agree with you," he wrote to his brother William, in 1867, "that Indian wars will not cease until all the Indian tribes are absorbed in our population, and can be controlled by constables instead of soldiers." Upon another phase of management Francis A. Walker wrote a little later: "There can be no question of national dignity involved in the treatment of savages by a civilized power. The proudest Anglo-Saxon will climb a tree with a bear behind him.... With wild men, as with wild beasts, the question whether to fight, coax, or run is a question merely of what is safest or easiest in the situation given." That responsibility for some decided action lay heavily upon the whites may be implied from the admission of Colonel Henry Inman, who knew the frontier well--"that, during more than a third of a century passed on the plains and in the mountains, he has never known of a war with the hostile tribes that was not caused by broken faith on the part of the United States or its agents." A professional Indian fighter, like Kit Carson, declared on oath that "as a general thing, the difficulties arise from aggressions on the part of the whites."