what was needed and used the whole animal, these settlers hunted them en masse for only their skins and tongues, and left the rest of the animal behind to decay on the ground. After the animals rotted, their bones were collected and shipped back east in large quantities. Due to the roaming behavior of bison, their mass destruction came with relative ease to the European hunters. When one bison in a herd is killed, the other bison gather around it. Due to this pattern, the ability of a hunter to kill one bison often led to the destruction of a large herd of them. In 1889, an essay in a journal of the time observed: Indigenous peoples whose lives depended on the Buffalo also continued to hunt, and they were faced with having to adapt to the arrival of European settlers in the Plains. While most struggled to continue their traditional ways, other Plains cultures were forced to adapt their style of hunting. Andrew Isenberg argues that some Native people embraced the fur trade, and that by adapting their hunting methods to include hunting on horseback, this added to the number of bison they could hunt. Commercial incentives For settlers of the Plains region, bison hunting served as a way to increase their economic stake in the area. Trappers and traders made their living selling buffalo fur; in the winter of 1872–1873, more than 1.5 million buffalo were put onto trains and moved eastward. In addition to the potential profits from buffalo leather, which was commonly used to make machinery belts and army boots, buffalo hunting forced Natives to become dependent on beef from cattle. General Winfield Scott Hancock, for example, reminded several Arapaho chiefs at Fort Dodge in 1867: "You know well that the game is getting very scarce and that you must soon have some other means of living; you should therefore cultivate the friendship of the white man, so that when the game is all gone, they may take care of you if necessary." Commercial bison hunters also emerged at this time. Military forts often supported hunters, who would use their civilian sources near their military base. Though officers hunted bison for food and sport, professional hunters made a far larger impact in the decline of bison population. Officers stationed in Fort Hays and Wallace even had bets in their "buffalo shooting championship of the world", between