In its annual reports made to the Secretary of the Interior in 1869, and since, the board gave much credit to the new peace policy. In 1869 it looked forward with confidence "to success in the effort to civilize the nomadic tribes." In 1871 it described "the remarkable spectacle seen this fall, on the plains of western Nebraska and Kansas and eastern Colorado, of the warlike tribes of the Sioux of Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming, hunting peacefully for buffalo without occasioning any serious alarm among the thousands of white settlers whose cabins skirt the borders of both sides of these plains." In 1872, "the advance of some of the tribes in civilization and Christianity has been rapid, the temper and inclination of all of them has greatly improved.... They show a more positive intention to comply with their own obligations, and to accept the advice of those in authority over them, and are in many cases disproving the assertion, that adult Indians cannot be induced to work." In 1906, in its _38th Annual Report_, there was still most marked improvement, "and for the last thirty years the legislation of Congress concerning Indians, their education, their allotment and settlement on lands of their own, their admission to citizenship, and the protection of their rights makes, upon the whole, a chapter of political history of which Americans may justly be proud." The board of Indian Commissioners believed that most of the obvious improvement in the Indian condition was due to the substitution of a peace policy for a policy of something else. It made a mistake in assuming that there had ever been a policy of war. So far as the United States government had been concerned the aim had always been peace and humanity, and only when over-eager citizens had pushed into the Indian Country to stir up trouble had a war policy been administered. Even then it was distinctly temporary. The events of the sixties had involved such continuous friction and necessitated such severe repression that contemporaries might be pardoned for thinking that war was the policy rather than the cure. But the resistance of the tribes would generally have ceased by 1870, even without the new peace policy. Every mile of western railway lessened the Indians' capacity for resistance by increasing the government's ability to repress it. The Union Pacific, Northern Pacific, Atlantic and Pacific, Texas Pacific, and Southern Pacific, to say nothing of a multitude of private roads like the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy, the Denver and Rio Grande, the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé, and the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas, were the real forces which brought peace upon the plains. Yet the board was right in that its influence in bringing closer harmony between public opinion and the Indian Bureau, and in improving the tone of the bureau, had made the transformation of the savage into the citizen farmer more rapid.