reports they were sometimes quenched in the winter snow. Dodge City saw railroad cars sent East filled with stacked hides. The building of the railroads through Colorado and Kansas split the bison herd in two parts, the southern herd and the northern herd. The last refuge of the southern herd was in the Texas Panhandle. Discussion of bison protection As the great herds began to wane, proposals to protect the bison were discussed. In some cases, individual military officers attempted to end the mass slaughter of these buffalo. William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody, among others, spoke in favor of protecting the bison because he saw that the pressure on the species was too great. Yet these proposals were discouraged since it was recognized that the Plains Indians, some of the tribes often at war with the United States, depended on bison for their way of life. (Other buffalo hunting tribes cannot tell of a single fight with the United States, namely tribes like the Assiniboine, the Hidatsa, the Gros Ventre, the Ponca and the Omaha). In 1874, President Ulysses S. Grant "pocket vetoed" a Federal bill to protect the dwindling bison herds, and in 1875 General Philip Sheridan pleaded to a joint session of Congress to slaughter the herds, to deprive the Indians of their source of food. By 1884, the American Bison was close to extinction. Subsequent settlers harvested bison bones to be sold for fertilizer. It was an important source of supplemental income for poorer farmers in the 1880s and early 1890s. Early reservation era final hunts During the 1870s and 1880s, more and more tribes went on their last great bison hunt. Led by Chief Washakie, around 1,800 Shoshones in the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming started out in October 1874. Going north, the men, women and children crossed the border of the reservation. Scouts came back with news of buffalo near Gooseberry Creek. The hunters got around 125 bison. Fewer hunters left the reservation the next two years and those who went focused on elk, deer and other game. The final hunt of the Omaha in Nebraska took place in December 1876. Hidatsa rebel Crow Flies High and his group established themselves on the Fort Buford Military Reservation, North Dakota, in the start of the 1870s and hunted bison in the Yellowstone area until game went scarce during the next decade. Indian agents, with insufficient