The attack on Adobe Walls in June 1874 has sometimes been described as an attempt to end the commercial hunting that was destroying the bison herds.

This framing is partly correct: the destruction of the bison was understood by the Southern Plains peoples as an existential threat, and striking at the hunters themselves — rather than their distant markets or the government policies that allowed them to operate — was a direct response to that threat.

The failed attack — the defenders’ Sharps rifles were too accurate and too powerful for the attackers to cross the open ground — was a military defeat.

But it was also a political marker that signaled the breakdown of any remaining capacity for peaceful coexistence between the off-reservation population and the commercial buffalo hunters in the treaty territory.