MANY OF THE ideas which were incorporated into the "Peace
Policy" originated with military personnel. The suggestions of
General Sully from his camp opposite Farm Island on the
Missouri River in 1864, and those of General Sherman in 1866
and 1868, have already been noted. It was Sully who urged the
government to gather peaceable Indians near military posts and
invite missionaries to educate their children. Although Sully's
proposal was original with him, Sherman's plan for two large
reservations, one north of the Platte and the other south of the
Arkansas, to which all roaming Indians of the plains must go
or perish by force of arms, was an elaboration of a stratagem
used by General James H. Carleton to subdue the Navajo be-
tween 1863 and 1865. ¹

Without the cooperation of the Army the "Peace Policy" was
unworkable. Those who favored the employment of Peace
Commissioners to assemble the hostile tribes were unrealistic.
Commissioner Nathaniel G. Taylor admitted in his report for
the Peace Commission in 1868 that the wilder Indians would
not willingly confine themselves to reservations, but contended
that they would eventually be starved into submission. The
frontier could not await such a result. Indeed, it was the frontier
that hurried the depletion of the game and ended the possibility
of life by the chase in a much shorter period than the twenty-
five years within which the Peace Commissioners assumed that
it might be possible to assimilate the Indians. Furthermore,
frontier population would not tolerate the working out of such

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