Grab: "Who needs wire when you've got a few hundred miles of desert with no food or water...?"

That's still inaccurate. Blameable as the US reservation policy was it is more that the Indians were forcibly removed from their ancestral homes to another region - different climate, no ties to their ancestors, sometimes encroaching on other tribes' lands - than it was that the new region was unlivable.

There are people living in those regions to this day.