What these peoples shared, in 1874, was a set of connected crises.

The Buffalo Crisis

The buffalo were dying.

Not from disease or natural disaster.

They were being killed by the millions, systematically, by commercial hunters who had developed both the technology and the market to render the vast bison herds of the Plains into saleable hides and bones.

Before European and American contact, the Plains bison population has been estimated in various historical accounts at anywhere from 30 million to 60 million animals.

By 1874, the commercial hide trade — which had intensified dramatically in the early 1870s with the development of a process for tanning buffalo hides into commercial leather — was killing hundreds of thousands of animals per year on the Southern Plains alone.