General George Crook alone was able to bring order into the Arizona frontier. From 1871 to 1875 he was there in command,--"the beau-ideal Indian fighter," Dunn calls him. For two years he engaged in constant campaigns against the "incorrigibly hostile," but before 1873 was over he had most of his Apache pacified, checked off, and under police supervision. He enrolled them and gave to each a brass identification check, so that it might be easier for his police to watch them. The tribes were passed back to the Indian Office in 1874, and Crook was transferred to another command in 1875. Immediately the Indian Commissioner commenced to concentrate the scattered tribes, but was hindered by hostilities among the Indians themselves quite as bitter as their hatred for the whites. First Victorio, and then Geronimo was the centre of the resistance to the concentration which placed hereditary enemies side by side. They protested against the sites assigned them, and successfully defied the Commissioner to carry out his orders. Crook was brought back to the department in 1882, and after another long war gradually established peace. Sitting Bull, who had fled to Canada in 1876, returned to Dakota in the early eighties in time to witness the rapid settlement of the northern plains and the growth of the territories towards statehood. After his revolt the Black Hills had been taken away from the tribe, as had been the vague hunting rights over northern Wyoming. Now as statehood advanced in the later eighties, and as population piled up around the edges of the reserve, the time was ripe for the medicine-men to preach the coming of a Messiah, and for Sitting Bull to increase his personal following. Bad crops which in these years produced populism in Kansas and Nebraska, had even greater menace for the half-civilized Indians. Agents and army officers became aware of the undercurrent of danger some months before trouble broke out. The state of South Dakota was admitted in November, 1889. Just a year later the Bureau turned the Sioux country over to the army, and General Nelson A. Miles proceeded to restore peace, especially in the vicinity of the Rosebud and Pine Ridge agencies. The arrest of Sitting Bull, who claimed miraculous powers for himself, and whose "ghost shirts" were supposed to give invulnerability to his followers, was attempted in December. The troops sent out were resisted, however, and in the mêlée the prophet was killed. The war which followed was much noticed, but of little consequence. General Miles had plenty of troops and Hotchkiss guns. Heliograph stations conveyed news easily and safely. But when orders were issued two weeks after the death of Sitting Bull to disarm the camp at Wounded Knee, the savages resisted. The troops within reach, far outnumbered, blazed away with their rapid-fire guns, regardless of age or sex, with such effect that more than two hundred Indian bodies, mostly women and children, were found dead upon the field.