"Medicine Bill" Comstock and "Buffalo Bill" Cody. Some of these hunters would engage in mass bison slaughter in order to make a living. Government involvement The US Army sanctioned and actively endorsed the wholesale slaughter of bison herds. The federal government promoted bison hunting for various reasons, primarily to pressure the native people onto the Indian reservations during times of conflict by removing their main food source. Without the bison, native people of the plains were often forced to leave the land or starve to death. One of the biggest advocates of this strategy was General William Tecumseh Sherman. On June 26, 1869, the Army Navy Journal reported: "General Sherman remarked, in conversation the other day, that the quickest way to compel the Indians to settle down to civilized life was to send ten regiments of soldiers to the plains, with orders to shoot buffaloes until they became too scarce to support the redskins." Similarly, Lieutenant General John M. Schofield would write in is memoirs: "With my cavalry and carbined artillery encamped in front, I wanted no other occupation in life than to ward off the savage and kill off his food until there should no longer be an Indian frontier in our beautiful country." Later, president Ulysses S. Grant vetoed the act of congress HR 921, which would have implemented protections against white overhunting of buffalo. Prior to this, Secretary of the Interior, Columbus Delano, had stated the following regarding complaints about whites hunting buffalo on native reservations:"While I would not seriously regret the total disappearance of the buffalo from our western prairies, in its effect on the Indians, regarding it rather as a means of hastening their sense of dependence upon the products of the soil and their own labors, yet these encroachments by the whites upon the reservations set apart for the exclusive occupancy of the Indian is one prolific source of trouble in the management of the reservation Indians, and measures should be adopted to prevent such trespasses in the future, or very serious collisions may be the result."Demonstrating clearly that he saw white poaching of bison as a problem only because it may lead to retaliations from the Indians, and on the contrary, that he saw the extermination of the buffalo as potentially beneficial in the forced assimilation of Indians. According to Professor David Smits: "Frustrated bluecoats, unable to deliver a punishing blow to the