Native American tribes of the western plains had fought against incursions by settlers, railroad builders, ranchers, mining companies, and the United States Army since the early 1860s. While Indians occasionally won the battle, as in the case of the Sioux victory over General George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, they were gradually losing the war, falling victim to disease, fraudulent treaties, superior firepower, and the deliberate dissemination of the bison, the primary resource of many nomadic tribes on the plains. In the wake of their military defeat, native people the 1880s also had to face a war on their cultures on a variety of fronts. White missionaries, philanthropists, and teachers tried to “reform” Indians by severing their ties to their native language and culture in Indian schools, by substituting the tribal ways of life with Christianity and the nuclear family model, and by promoting individual property ownership for farmers over reservation life in the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887. Prairie Indians resisted frequently, and the attempts of reformers to “kill the Indians and save the man” failed to transform Native Americans into Christian farmers.