federal negotiators. Tensions between Native Americans and white travelers of the Great Plains, forced, in 1851, U.S. officials invited the Native Americans tribes from the northern plains to a conference in the grassy valley along the North Platte River in what is now southeastern Wyoming, near Fort Laramie. After nearly three weeks of heated discussions, during which the chiefs were presented with a mountain of gifts, federal negotiators and tribal leaders agreed to what became known as the Fort Laramie Treaty. The government promised to provide annual cash payments to the Indians as compensation for the damage caused by wagon trains traversing their hunting grounds. In exchange, the Indians agreed to stop harassing white caravans, allow federal forts to be built, and confine themselves to a specified area “of limited extent and well-defined boundaries. As the first comprehensive treaty with the Plains Indians, it foreshadowed the “reservation” concept that would come to define Indian life by the end of the nineteenth century.