Red Cloud's War: The Fetterman Trap, Burned Forts and the 1868 Treaty

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By the 1850s shrinking buffalo herds pushed the Lakota, with Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho allies, west into the Powder River Country, land the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty had recognized as Crow territory. The Oglala Lakota leader Red Cloud rose in that expanding power, and the displaced Crow later scouted for the U.S. Army. After gold was found in Montana in 1863, the Bozeman Trail cut through these hunting grounds. In spring 1866, while Red Cloud was negotiating at Fort Laramie, Colonel Henry Carrington arrived with about 1,300 soldiers and more than 200 wagons to build forts along the trail. Red Cloud accused the government of bad faith and walked out, beginning a campaign of raids on wood and hay details.

On December 21, 1866, Captain William Fetterman disobeyed orders, chased a decoy party that included Crazy Horse over Lodge Trail Ridge, and died with all 81 of his men, the Army's worst defeat on the Plains until Little Bighorn. New breech-loading Springfield rifles blunted later charges at the Hayfield and Wagon Box fights, but the Army estimated it would need 20,000 troops to win. In August 1868 it abandoned Fort Phil Kearny, Fort C.F. Smith and Fort Reno, which were burned, and only then did Red Cloud sign the treaty in November. He spent his last decades at Pine Ridge fighting the Indian Bureau through petitions and trips to Washington until his death in 1909.

• Fetterman had reportedly boasted that with 80 men he could ride through the entire Sioux Nation.
• To grant the Powder River lands to the Lakota, the United States first pressured the Crow into selling them.
• Red Cloud met Presidents Grant, Hayes and Cleveland and spoke at the Cooper Union in New York in 1870.
• His long feud with Pine Ridge agent Valentine McGillicuddy ended with the agent's dismissal.
• After a 1980 Supreme Court ruling on the Black Hills, the compensation fund now exceeds $1 billion, and the Sioux refuse to accept it.