Between 1868 and 1875, the area at Fort Parker served as south-central Montana's cultural crossroads, where settlers and Indians traded goods and services, the U.S. government sought and failed to convert the Crow Tribe to farming and other Anglo ways, and many frontiersmen instead married Indians and adopted their ways. During roughly the same period, the bison herds of the Great Plains, central to the Crow Tribe's lifestyle and religion, were destroyed. Built here in 1869 as the first Crow Agency, Fort Parker became a resting point for many white explorers as well as Indian leaders, and virtually every major expedition into the Yellowstone Park area stopped there, including the Langford-Washburn Expedition, widely credited with recommending creation of the world's first national park, and the Hayden Survey, sent in 1871 to gather visual and other detailed information used to persuade Congress to create the park in 1872. The fort burned down a year after it was built, was replaced with a poorly constructed adobe fort that lasted only a few more years, and in 1875 the government moved the Crow Agency to a site near present-day Absarokee, Montana.