Actually, many of those "failed farms" ARE now owned by the Indians, at least around here. And the potato and other crops raised and sold by the Shoshone and Bannock (also spelled "Bannack") tribes bring in some pretty decent money -- not as much as the casinos, but pretty good money nonetheless.

Other "failed farms" are actually buildings abandoned when the owners could afford to build new and bigger homes elsewhere on the spread. Some too were sold, for whatever reason, and consolidated into larger spreads. And yet another reason for abandoned buildings in the West is that they are old line camps that are no longer used (regularily, that is -- some are still used intermittently even if the roof IS no longer intact).

Dear Teribus -- I spent better than ten years administering both Unix- and Windows- based computer systems and I'm having to "pick up the screwdrive" a little bit again. I <+2>WOULD NEVER
Custer might have survived if he'd thought the same, instead of seperating his forces and having the hubris that took him and his men to their deaths.

And as for your "argument" that "Stone Age" (neolithic? paleolithic?) means "clumsy and backwards" -- at the turn of the 20th Century a surgeon in, I believe, the Netherlands used a neolithic saw to amputate a leg. It worked just as well and as fast as the best bone saw of the period.

And I will leave you with this thought, Mr. T.: a bow made from sinew-backed wood, such as were used by the Plains tribes, firing a stone-tipped arrow will kill you just as dead as a round from an AK-74 or and M-16A2; a stone axe will crush your skull as completely as a iron-headed mace; an obsidian dagger will work as well (or perhaps even more effectively) than a Fairbairn-Applegate knife.

And the Sioux and Cheyenne, at the LBH, had weapons far superior to those I've just described -- and contrary to uninformed opinion, they could use them as well as the soldiers (and given that rifle practice wasn't very common among the soldiers of 1876 -- see "Forty Miles A Day On Beans And Hay" -- probably better).