Of the four classes of persons whose interrelations determined the condition of the frontier, none admitted that it desired to provoke Indian wars. The tribes themselves consistently professed a wish to be allowed to remain at peace. The Indian agents lost their authority and many of their perquisites during war time. The army and the frontiersmen denied that they were belligerent. "I assert," wrote Custer, "and all candid persons familiar with the subject will sustain the assertion, that of all classes of our population the army and the people living on the frontier entertain the greatest dread of an Indian war, and are willing to make the greatest sacrifices to avoid its horrors." To fix the responsibility for the wars which repeatedly occurred, despite the protestations of amiability on all sides, calls for the examination of individual episodes in large number. It is easier to acquit the first two classes than the last two. There are enough instances in which the tribes were persuaded to promise and keep the peace to establish the belief that a policy combining benevolence, equity, and relentless firmness in punishing wrong-doers, white or red, could have maintained friendly relations with ease. The Indian agents were hampered most by their inability to enforce the laws intrusted to them for execution, and by the slowness of the Senate in ratifying agreements and of Congress in voting supplies. The frontiersmen, with their isolated homesteads lying open to surprise and destruction, would seem to be sincere in their protestations; yet repeatedly they thrust themselves as squatters upon lands of unquieted Indian title, while their personal relations with the red men were commonly marked by fear and hatred. The army, with greater honesty and better administration than the Indian Bureau, overdid its work, being unable to think of the Indians as anything but public enemies and treating them with an arbitrary curtness that would have been dangerous even among intelligent whites. The history of the southwest Indians, after the Sand Creek massacre, illustrates well how tribes, not specially ill-disposed, became the victims of circumstances which led to their destruction.