In 1863, John Bozeman and John Jacobs blazed a new trail through the buffalo-rich Powder River Country to the southwest Montana mining camps, but the Bozeman Trail could be deadly for the men and women who traveled it because the Lakota and Northern Cheyenne hotly defended their land, the last great hunting grounds of the northern plains. By 1864, travelers risked attack and death on the Bozeman Trail, so that year Jim Bridger established the Bridger Cut-Off through the arid Bighorn Basin to the Yellowstone River, where it intersected the Bozeman Trail. Although safer and 100 miles shorter, Bridger's trail was much tougher to navigate, with scarce grass for oxen, horses, and cattle despite plentiful water and wood along Clark's Fork of the Yellowstone River north to the confluence of Rock Creek, where it turned northwesterly and reached the Yellowstone near present Big Timber. Despite avoiding trouble with Indians, the Bridger Cut-Off never caught on, and in 1864 only 129 wagons and perhaps 450 people traveled it.