From the mid-1840s to early 1860s, emigrants, gold seekers, and Mormon settlers entering the homeland of the Shoshone and Bannock led to conflict and often violent encounters. Despite Mormon efforts to supply food, starvation loomed as livestock from new settlements and thousands of oxen and horses pulling emigrant wagons and stagecoaches depleted grasses and drove away bison and other large game critical to Shoshone and Bannock survival. To prevent starvation and drive out intruders, Indians raided cattle herds and homesteads, robbed and killed miners and emigrants on the trails, and attacked coaches and stage stations, disrupting vital mail service, leading to retaliations on both sides. In 1862, Colonel Patrick E. Connor, assigned to protect the emigrant trails along the Bear River and the Overland Mail, launched a surprise attack on Shoshone Chief Bear Hunter's winter village, and the January 1863 attack near present-day Preston, Idaho, became the largest single massacre of Native Americans in the West, infamously known as the Bear River Massacre. In October 1863, U.S. officials and leaders of the Shoshone and Bannock, representing about 5,000 people, signed the Camp Connor Treaty, officially ending the violence in the area. In return for government provisions, the tribes promised not to trouble travelers crossing their lands and to permit more roads to be built; the treaty brought peace along the emigrant trails and in settlements, opened prime agricultural lands and resources to more settlers, and forever changed the lives of the Shoshone and Bannock people.