Whether or not the specific quote is precisely accurate, it reflects a genuine understanding that the bison and the Lakota way of life were inseparable, and that eliminating the bison would accomplish what military force had so far failed to accomplish.

The bison herds of the Powder River Country were the specific resource that the 1868 treaty had protected.

The unceded territory provision was meaningful precisely because the territory contained the bison range.

Red Cloud’s War was in a fundamental sense a war to protect the bison as much as to protect the land — the two were not separable.

The commercial bison hunting that devastated the southern herd in the early 1870s moved north in the later 1870s and effectively destroyed the northern herd — the Powder River Country herd — by the early 1880s.

By the time the Black Hills crisis was reaching its climax, the bison that had sustained the Lakota economy for generations were already dramatically reduced from their historic abundance.