Bison are quickly disappearing from the plains…
1877 CE
Jacob Vore, a Quaker appointed as U.S. Indian agent to the Omaha Reservation under President Ulysses S. Grant, had started in September 1876, succeeding T.S. Gillingham, also a Quaker.
Vore had distributed a reduced annuity that year, just before the Omaha left on their annual buffalo hunt; according to his later account, he intended to "encourage" the Omaha to work at more agriculture.
After thirty-four camp moves, the hunters find bison four hundred miles outside the Omaha Reservation.
They suffer a poor hunting season and severe winter, so that some are starving before late spring.
Vore gains a supplement to the annuities which he had distributed, but for the remaining years of his tenure through 1879, he will distribute no cash annuities of the twenty thousand dollars per year that is part of the 1854 treaty.
Instead, he supplies goods: harrows, wagons, harnesses and various kinds of plows and implements to support the agricultural work.
He tells the tribe that Washington DC officials had disapproved the annuity.
The people have no recourse, and struggle to raise more produce, increasing the harvest to twenty thousand bushels.
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Northern North America
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