The opening narration
The screen writers of She wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), Frank S. Nugent and Laurence Stallings, certainly deserved some sort of joke award for the most overblown opening narration. I am sure it wasn't the fault of James Warner Bellah, the writer of the stories that the film was loosely based on.
Here is the opening narration:
Custer is dead.
And around the bloody guidon
of the immortal 7th Cavalry...
... lie 212 officers and men.
The Sioux and Cheyenne
are on the warpath.
By military telegraph,
news of the Custer massacre...
... is flashed across the long,
lonely miles to the Southwest.
By stagecoach to the 100 settlements
and the 1000 farms...
... standing under threat
of an Indian uprising.
Pony Ezpress riders know that
one more such defeat as Custer's...
... and it'd be a hundred years before
a wagon train crossed the plains.
And from the Canadian border
to the Rio Bravo, 10,000 Indians...
... Kiowa, Comanche, Arapaho,
Sioux and Apache...
... under Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse,
Gall and Crow King...
... are uniting in a common war
against the United States Cavalry.
https://www.scripts.com/script/she_wore_a_yellow_ribbon_17961
It is a fact that people can "fear", or "believe with fanatical conviction" that which is not true, but nobody can "know" that which is not true. You can only "know" something is factually accurate. Thus most poeple don't know as much as they think that they do.
So the pony express riders in 1876 couldn't "know" that if there was another such defeat as Custer's it would be a hundred years, or until 1976, before a wagon train crossed the plains again, because, as should have been obvious to any script writers in 1947 or 1948, that was not correct.
In real life the entire US army had about 25,000 men in 1876. There were about 200,000 Indians in the trans Mississippi west around that time, half of them male, and half of them of fighting age. So there were about 50,000 Indian warriors in the west, and only some of them were Plains Indian warriors. And I think that the hostile Plains tribes would have had a total of far fewer than the 10,000 warriors mentioned by the narrator. Many of the plains tribes, victims of constant Sioux and Cheyenne aggession, were allies of the USA in the Great Sioux War of 1876-77.
It is said that in 1939, at the start of WWII, the US army had 189,839 men, smaller than the 200,000 man army of Portugal The US army reached 8,267,958 men in 1945.
https://www.quora.com/What-was-the-size-of-the-US-military-in-WW2
So sending ten men for every one Indian Warrior in the west, if necessary, would have taken only a fraction of the US army in World war Two. They could have guarded the builders of railroads, highways, and oil pipelines to make transportation of people and goods between the east and the west coasts easier and faster. The benefit that conquering the Plains indians gave to the war effort against Germany and Japan would have been worth the effort.
The same would have been true during World War One. The US army reached over a million men in that war, and sending some of them to defeat the Plains Indians would have given them some useful combat experience and would have made transporting people and goods between the east west coasts much faster.
In the Spanish American War the US army increased to about 250,000. And I think that if the hostile plains tribes were still unconquered in the 1890s, Hearst newspapers would have been advocating their conquest instead of war with Spain.
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