An article in Austin’s Southern Intelligencer in 1857, reported that a drought was underway between the Colorado and Brazos Rivers. “The water in creeks and small rivers, formally running, is now reduced to stagnant pools. Even the Bosque is in this shape.” As it turned out, the drought involved all of the Great Plains, not just Texas. The rains would not return to the West and Plains until the mid-1860s. David Stahle of the University of Arkansas used tree ring analysis to show that in Texas, this was the worst drought in the previous 300 years, worse than the Dust Bowl drought in the 1930s. This drought could not have come at a worse time for bison. Normally they would move into the valleys to avoid the drought, but Euro-American emigrants and Indian refugees were already in the valleys and with their grazing animals, had already destroyed the best grasses. Persistent La Nina and increased hunting nearly drove the bison to extinction during this time. The bison recovery after the Civil War drought brought temporarly hope for Plains peoples – at least until the locust plagues in the 1870s.