A Brief History of South Dakota/Chapter 23

by Doane Robinson

CHAPTER XXIII

THE RED CLOUD WAR

In 1865, about the time that the War of the Outbreak ended, the government undertook to build a highway
Scene of the Red Cloud War from the California trail, in the vicinity of Fort Laramie, across by way of the Powder River valley to the gold mines in Montana and Idaho. This road was necessarily run through the richest buffalo range left to the Sioux Indians. Red Cloud was then fast coming into prominence as the principal chief of the Oglala Sioux. The construction of the road was intrusted to Colonel Sawyer, and he began work with a party of surveyors and an escort of only twenty-five men, from Company B of the Dakota Cavalry. Red Cloud met them near the Black Hills and protested against their entering the buffalo country. They paid no attention to his protest and went forward. Red Cloud then gathered a large body of the Oglalas and Cheyennes and, overtaking Sawyer's party at the Powder River, surrounded them and held them in siege for a period of fifteen days.

Red Cloud used no force, his intention being, by a show of strength, to bluff the roadmakers out of his country. At the end of two weeks the young Indians were becoming so unruly and threatening that Red Cloud did not longer dare continue the siege, fearing that his young men would get beyond his control and massacre the white men. He therefore withdrew his Indians, and the expedition moved on to the Tongue River. By this time Red Cloud had his young men again well in hand, and he again surrounded Sawyer and held him for three days, and then withdrew. He had failed in his attempt to stop the road building. Sawyer went on to the Yellowstone and then returned without molestation, but Red Cloud had resolved that the road should not be built.

That fall (1865) commissioners undertook to treat with the Oglalas for the opening of the road, but Red Cloud would not permit a treaty to be made,—in fact did not attend the council. A new attempt was made to secure the consent of the Indians to the opening of the road, and at Fort Laramie on June 30, 1866, Red Cloud addressed the commissioners in a council held under an improvised arbor near the fort. Mildly but firmly he told them that the Oglalas' last hope of subsistence lay in preserving the buffalo pastures of the Powder River country, and that they could not under any consideration consent to the opening of a highway through that region. While he was speaking, General Carrington, with a strong force of soldiers, arrived at the fort.

"Why do these soldiers come?" asked Red Cloud.

"They have come to build forts and open the Montana road," was the reply.

Red Cloud sprang from the platform, caught up his rifle and brandished it before the commission, and cried, "In this and the Great Spirit, I trust for the right." Calling his people to follow him, he left the commission sitting without an audience.

General Carrington was instructed to go out on the Montana road, to rebuild and garrison Fort Reno, and then to go on to the head waters of the Powder River, where he was to build a strong post. Immediately after leaving Fort Laramie on this mission Carrington was met by Red Cloud, who protested against his going into the country. Of course Carrington was a soldier under orders, and paid no attention to this protest. Red Cloud began a campaign of annoyance and attacks upon the soldiers, which rendered their mission very hazardous and exceedingly difficult.

Leaving a small garrison at Fort Reno, the main body went on to the foot of the Big Horn Mountains, where Fort Phil Kearney was built. There, throughout the season, while the soldiers were engaged in building Fort Kearney and supplying it with fuel, Red Cloud kept up the most tantalizing tactics, and it was soon unsafe for any white person to be outside of the stockade unless protected by a large detachment of military. General Carrington reported that "a team could not be sent to the wood yard nor a load of hay brought in from the meadows unless it was accompanied by a strong guard. The first hunters sent out came in themselves hunted, and though there was an abundance of game in the vicinity no hunter was brave enough to stalk it." A reign of terror grew up among the civilians so that none of the teamsters would leave the stockade for wood or supplies unless accompanied by many soldiers. Attacks upon the wood guard were of almost daily occurrence, and the result was always to the advantage of the Indians.

Red Cloud had by this time assembled an army of not less than three thousand men, with their families, and this vast concourse of people he fed and clothed while keeping Fort Phil Kearney almost in a state of siege. Finally, on the twenty-first day of December, 1866, Red Cloud appeared in force between Fort Phil Kearney and the wood camp seven miles distant. Captain Fetterman, with a force of eighty-one men, was sent out to drive him away. The Indians craftily led Fetterman into an ambush and his entire force was destroyed. Not one man lived to come back and tell the story. Throughout the following year the Indians kept up this mode of warfare and were perfectly successful in preventing the opening of the Montana road. Not a single wagon was ever able to pass over it. On the 1st of August, 1867, another severe battle was fought between the whites and Indians at the wood camp; both parties lost heavily, but the Indians' loss was much the greater.

By this time the people of the country had begun to think that perhaps Red Cloud was fighting for a principle, and the President was prevailed upon to send out a commission whose duty it was to ascertain the real occasion of the war, and to negotiate a treaty of peace if it was thought wise to do so. Generals Sherman, Harney, Terry, and Auger were members of this commission.
Red Cloud The commission sent Swift Bear, a friendly Brule Indian, to Red Cloud's army on the Powder River, and invited Red Cloud to meet the commissioners at Fort Laramie. Red Cloud declined to come down, but sent word to the commissioners by the well-known chief Man Afraid of His Horses, that his war against the whites was to save the valley of the Powder River, the only hunting ground left to his nation, from white intrusion. He told the commissioners that whenever the military garrisons at Fort Phil Kearney, Fort C. F. Smith, and Fort Reno were withdrawn, the war on his part would cease. The commissioners sent word to him, asking for a truce until a council could be held. Red Cloud replied that he would meet them the next spring or summer.

Early in the spring of 1868 the commissioners returned to Fort Laramie and met there some leading Indians whom Red Cloud had sent to them, but he did not himself come down. On the 29th of April a treaty was signed, which provided that the troops should be withdrawn from Forts Phil Kearney, C. F. Smith, and Reno, and that all attempts to open the Montana road should be abandoned. A great reservation was made for the use of the Indians, extending from the mouth of the Niobrara River west to the Big Horn Mountains, thence north to the Yellowstone River, then east by the Cannonball to the Missouri and down the Missouri to the Niobrara. All of the Sioux tribes joined in giving up to the government all of the lands they possessed outside of this great reservation. The government agreed that no white men or soldiers should at any time enter this reservation without the consent of the Indians.

It was particularly important that Red Cloud should sign this treaty, but he failed to come in for the purpose. Messengers were sent to him, but he sent back word that he thought he should wait until the forts were abandoned, and the roads closed up, before he signed; and so matters dragged along month after month. Finally, at the end of August, upon the advice of the peace commissioners, the government determined to take the chief at his word, and on the 27th of that month all of the troops were withdrawn.

Red Cloud at the time was watching operations from his buffalo camp on the Powder River, and when a messenger was sent to him to tell him that the troops had been taken away, he said it was so late in the season that he thought he would make his winter's meat before he came down to meet the commissioners. This caused great uneasiness in military quarters and in the Indian department, for it was feared that Red Cloud did not intend to keep faith. However, when he had finished his fall's work, he appeared at Fort Laramie (November 6) and signed the treaty, which was duly ratified by the Senate on February 16, 1869, and was proclaimed by President Andrew Johnson on February 24. Thus the great Red Cloud War came to an end.

Red Cloud had been entirely successful and obtained everything he was fighting for. It is the only instance in the history of the United States in which the government has gone to war and afterward made a peace conceding everything demanded by the enemy and exacting nothing in return. From the date of this peace Red Cloud faithfully observed its terms and, according to Indian standards, lived a good life. At more than eighty years of age, in 1905, he was still living at Pine Ridge agency, near the Black Hills.