In August 1867, Grant appointed Sheridan to head the Department of the Missouri and pacify the Plains. His troops, even supplemented with state militia, were spread too thin to have any real effect. He conceived a strategy similar to the one he used in the Shenandoah Valley. In the Winter Campaign of 1868–69 (of which the Battle of Washita River was part) he attacked the Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Comanche tribes in their winter quarters, taking their supplies and livestock and killing those who resisted, driving the rest back into their reservations. When Sherman was promoted to General of the Army following Grant's election as President of the United States, Sheridan was appointed to command the Military Division of the Missouri, with all the Great Plains under his command. Professional hunters, trespassing on Indian land, killed over 4 million bison by 1874. As historian Dan Flores has shown, the quotations attributed to Sheridan that celebrate buffalo hunting or that he ever appeared before the Texas legislature about this matter are almost certainly apocryphal. As Flores notes, "there is no evidence the nineteenth-century Texas legislature ever considered a bill to outlaw or regulate the hide hunt." These erroneous charges against Sheridan first surfaced in the 1907 memoir of buffalo hunter John Cook.