The mountains provided game.

The valley was not “empty land” in the settler sense.

It was fully occupied in the most important sense: it was the homeland of people who knew it, whose seasonal calendar was organized around it, who had been living in it and caring for it for generations.

When settler ranchers began entering the valley in the early 1870s, they brought a fundamentally different understanding of land: that it could be individually owned, that ownership conferred the right to exclude others, and that the absence of fences or permanent structures did not constitute real occupancy.

The clash of these frameworks — Indigenous stewardship versus settler ownership — was the underlying conflict that produced the 1877 crisis.