Or they could attempt to negotiate, petition, and argue their case through agents and commissioners who had limited authority and even more limited willingness to enforce treaty obligations against the commercial interests encroaching on Native territory.

Some individuals and families did all three of these things at different times.

The reality of reservation life in the early 1870s was not a clean binary between “reservation Indians” who had accepted peaceful accommodation and “renegades” who were conducting raids and resisting.

It was a complex situation in which people made different decisions based on their circumstances, their band leadership, their assessment of realistic options, and their own histories.

What is clear is that by the summer of 1874, the conditions on the reservations had deteriorated badly enough and the pressure from commercial buffalo hunters on the remaining treaty hunting grounds had intensified enough that a significant number of Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Arapaho families had left the agencies and were living off-reservation on the Southern Plains.