By the nineteenth century, Colorado’s southeastern plains country was home to many native peoples, including Comanches, Kiowas, Plains Apaches, Arapahos, and Cheyennes, who, despite major differences in language and culture, shared adaptations such as the horse, the travois, and the tipi that helped them survive and prosper on the prairie. The Southern Cheyennes, originally an agricultural people from the Great Lakes region, moved into the western plains in the seventeenth century and by the early nineteenth century occupied present Kiowa County and southeastern Colorado, living with other native peoples in both cooperation and conflict. After the Indian peace council of 1840, the region experienced a generation of relative quiet until the peace was shattered in 1864 at Sand Creek, where U.S. troops killed over 150 Cheyenne and Arapaho men, women, and children, and in 1867 the Cheyennes, with their Arapaho, Kiowa, and Comanche allies, were forcibly removed to reservation lands in present Oklahoma. Buffalo dominated this country as a vital resource and once numbered in the tens of millions across the western grasslands, including about eight million on the southern Plains, before white and Indian hunters decimated the herds in the late nineteenth century. In January 1872, Grand Duke Alexis of Russia came to Colorado for a celebrated buffalo hunt near here with an escort that included Philip H. Sheridan, George Armstrong Custer, Buffalo Bill Cody, and Wild Bill Hickok, and his successful hunt was said to improve relations between Russia and the United States. Explorers judged the southeastern plains in sharply different ways, from Spanish praise of their beauty and fertility in 1601 and 1706 to American descriptions of a desert in 1806 and 1820, yet the region supported immense wildlife, later vast cattle herds, and eventually major crop production. Large-scale cattle ranching began in the 1870s after Plains Indians had been forced onto reservations and buffalo had been hunted nearly to extinction, and the open range lasted until the late 1890s, when rails, windmills, and barbed wire opened the region more fully to farming. The wider high plains country also includes places tied to this history, including the Kit Carson County Carousel, the Great Plains Reservoirs, Sand Creek, Bent’s Old Fort, Fort Lyon, the Bent County Historical Courthouse, the Santa Fe Trail route, Boggsville, and Camp Amache, where about 10,000 Japanese Americans were held from 1942 to 1945.