Of how they lived, and where, during the winter following this fight, there is little record. In the next year's reports the Cheyennes are said to be very anxious for a new treaty, which will assign to them a country in which they can dwell safely. "They said they had learned a lesson last summer in their fight with General Sumner—that it was useless to contend with the white man, who would soon with his villages occupy the whole prairie. They wanted peace; and as the buffalo—their principal dependence for food and clothing (which even now they were compelled to seek many miles from home, where their natural enemies, the Pawnee and Osage, roamed), would soon disappear entirely, they hoped their Great Father, the white chief at Washington, would listen to them, and give them a home where they might be provided for and protected against the encroachments of their white brothers, until at least they had been taught to cultivate the soil and other arts of civilized life. They have often desired ploughs and hoes, and to be taught their use."
The next year's records show the Government itself aware that some measures must be taken to provide for these troublesome wild tribes of the prairie: almost more perplexing in time of peace than in time of war is the problem of the disposition to be made of them. Agents and superintendents alike are pressing on the Government's attention the facts and the bearing of the rapid settling of the Indian lands by the whites; the precariousness of peaceful relations; the dangers of Indian wars. The Indians themselves are deeply anxious and disturbed.
"They have heard that all of the Indian tribes to the eastward of them have ceded their lands to the United States, except small reservations; and hence, by an Indian's reasoning, in a few years these tribes will emigrate farther west, and, as a matter of necessity, occupy the hunting-grounds of the wild tribes."
When the agent of the Upper Platte Agency tried to reason on this subject with one of the Sioux chiefs, the chief said: "When I was a young man, and I am not yet fifty, I travelled with my people through the country of the Sac and Fox tribe, to the great water Minne Toukah (Mississippi), where I saw corn growing, but no white people; continuing eastward, we came to the Rock River valley, and saw the Winnebagoes, but no white people. We then came to the Fox River valley, and thence to the Great Lake (Lake Michigan), where we found a few white people in the Pottawattomie country. Thence we returned to the Sioux country at the Great Falls of Irara (St. Anthony), and had a feast of green corn with our relations, who resided there. Afterward we visited the pipe-clay quarry in the country of the Yankton Sioux, and made a feast to the 'Great Medicine,' and danced the 'sun dance,' and then returned to our hunting-grounds on the prairie. And now our Father tells us the white man will never settle on our lands, and kill our game; but see! the whites cover all of those lands I have just described, and also the lands of the Poncas, Omahas, and Pawnees. On the South Platte the white people are finding gold, and the Cheyennes and Arapahoes have no longer any hunting-grounds. Our country has become very small, and before our children are grown up we shall have no game."