Red Cloud's War

11 Key excerpts on "Red Cloud's War"

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  The Heart of Everything That Is

  The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend

  • Bob Drury, Tom Clavin(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Simon & Schuster

    (Publisher)

  The mean, small structure, erected in 1834 and initially named Fort William, was the only American trading post west of the Missouri. Situated at the juncture of the Laramie and the North Platte in southeastern Wyoming, about midway between present-day Cheyenne and Casper, it was the brainchild of an Irish-born mountain man, Robert Campbell, and was named after his trigger-happy partner, William Sublette, who was said to have fled the mountains after initiating the slaughter of a band of peaceful Gros Ventres during the annual mountain man rendezvous of 1832. Campbell and Sublette had trapped in the Rockies for over a dozen years, and both recognized by the mid-1830s that the European craze for beaver hats was dying. The new money would be made in buffalo robes, and the two did a thriving business, especially with the Lakota, whose superior tanned hides of buffalo cows were craved by the merchants in St. Louis. (Bull hides were deemed of lesser quality.)

  Fort William, protected by a fifteen-foot palisade of cottonwood logs and a cannon mounted in a blockhouse over the front gate, became a regular winter transit point for Indians meandering across the Powder River Country. White-Indian interactions were generally peaceable. Given their isolation and small numbers, the two mountain men and the few teamsters they employed did not have much of a choice. The Indians, meanwhile, not only wanted and needed the dry goods they imported, but saw no glory to be gained by wiping them out. They were, after all, merely whites. The Lakota, in any case, were still busy with the broader pursuits of their Plains expansionism, raiding and fighting the Crows, Ute, Pawnee, and Kiowa at every opportunity.

  Once they took a territory, the Sioux patrolled it ruthlessly. This philosophy of security through aggression naturally filtered down to individuals, for whom military glory became a stepping-stone to leadership. It was impossible to become a Sioux leader without also being a distinguished warrior, and no one was more prepared to seize the mantle and the rewards that came with it than Red Cloud. The most important of these rewards was social advancement. “When I was young among our nation, I was poor,” he told Sam Deon. “But from the wars with one nation or another, I raised myself to be a chief.”

  A warrior’s vocation was the only path to success and stature for a fatherless boy, even a boy with powerful and respected uncles. Red Cloud was about sixteen years old when he joined his first raiding party. It was sometime in the late 1830s, and the Lakota were waging a war of attrition against the Pawnee, who dwelled in stationary earth lodges and whose territory in east-central Nebraska was dwindling precariously. One day after a rare unsuccessful raid on a Pawnee stronghold along the twisting Platte, word spread through the Oglala camp that Red Cloud’s older cousin had been killed in the fight. The horror of losing a battle to the lowly Pawnee turned to cold fury, and Old Smoke organized an even larger retaliatory force from among several Lakota bands camping nearby. Red Cloud had always, if reluctantly, obeyed the pleas of his mother when she argued that he was too young to take part in these raids. Despite a Sioux woman’s inferior status, Walks As She Thinks did speak with some authority due to her brothers’ standing. But even the respect afforded Old Smoke and White Hawk could not alter the fact that Red Cloud’s absence from the war parties was beginning to be remarked on.

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  Red Cloud's War: An Insurgency Case Study For Modern Times

  • Lt.-Col. Michael G. Miller(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Normanby Press

    (Publisher)

  {43}

  The Army takes the Trail

  Ft. Laramie was the “center of important interests to the people of the West” in June 1866.{44} The Ft. Laramie Peace Commission was an effort by U.S. government and the Indian Commission to gain Indian approval for movement along the Bozeman Trail, and for the U.S. Army garrisons there to protect the Immigrants. If this Peace Commission had been successful in getting the approval from all the tribes involved, there is little doubt that later tragedies would have been avoided. Instead, Margaret Carrington said that the failure of the treaty and Red Cloud’s departure in anger held, “ominous portents for the future.”{45} She was referring to the extremely difficult tasks of building new forts, securing the trail and ensuring safe movement with a command that was “barely sufficient to do its expected work on the basis of permanent and reliable peace,” let alone in hostile Indian Country.{46}

  On June 17, 1866 Carrington’s long column departed Ft. Laramie with the eight companies of the 2nd Battalion of the 18th Infantry and its 226 wagon train, taking possession of the trail with the first destination being Ft. Reno.{47} What’s important here is not the obvious spectacle of such a large train hitting the trail in all its pomp and glory, but what was missing. Why the force was predominately infantry instead of cavalry is unknown. Against this mobile enemy, General Sherman himself remained convinced that, “cavalry is the most efficient arm of the service for existing conditions in Indian Country.”{48} While at Ft. Laramie, Carrington had made repeated requests of the post commander for his promised 100,000 rounds ammunition, horses and wagon drivers. But the requests fell on deaf ears, and were never to be had. The fact is that he departed with just a fraction of what had been promised, and what they needed to properly perform the task they were ordered to. This would be a reoccurring problem for Carrington and his men in the Powder River Campaign.{49}

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  Native Voices

  Sources in the Native American Past

  • Mark Nicholas(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Pahá Sápa, was the central geological feature within the sacred landscape of the Sioux. The importance of the Black Hills to the Sioux cannot be overstated.

  In the 1870s, the northern plains’ war broke out again between the Sioux and the United States, and the Black Hills was central to the struggle known as the Great Sioux War, waged from 1876 to 1877. The earnestness on both sides during the war had everything to do with the Black Hills territory and conflicting ideas about the region’s significance: For the Sioux, it was their land, and it was sacred; for American prospectors, it was an untouched area from which to harvest gold. The United States, in the midst of an economic crisis and ineffective at keeping western fortune seekers looking for gold from entering the Black Hills, abrogated Sioux treaty rights to the Black Hills, agreed upon in the second Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. The Sioux, responding to the transgressions of the United States, factionalized. Ordered to move to their reserved tracts by the United States, the Sioux responded in two ways. Red Cloud and his followers accommodated and settled near the Red Cloud agency, a precursor to the Sioux reservations, located along the Platte River, just south from Fort Laramie. Red Cloud agency, staffed by American field agents, doled out weekly rations and annuity payments to Red Cloud and his Oglala followers. The militant Sioux led by Sitting Bull (Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux) and Crazy Horse (Oglala Lakota Sioux) stalwartly refused, and the Sioux under their leadership went to war with the United States. In a tactical maneuver to try for a swift victory over the Sioux, the United States turned to Crow and Shoshone warriors whose enmity against their Sioux rivals stretched back generations, and who were emboldened by the idea of eliminating the Sioux to elevate their own status and power on the plains. Both Crow and Shoshone warriors therefore joined the ranks of General George Armstrong Custer’s army.

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  Crazy Horse and Custer

  The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors

  • Stephen E. Ambrose(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Open Road Media

    (Publisher)

  Friendly Indians, mainly young Brulés, made a regular run between Fort Laramie and the hostile camp, bringing ammunition and other supplies with them; on the return trip they carried buffalo robes for which they found a ready market among the traders. Occasional hunting parties provided more meat than the hostiles could use. In every respect, in short, Red Cloud supported and equipped his army better than the government supported Carrington. 15 When winter came on, Red Cloud moved the allied camp to the base of the Bighorns, near the headwaters of the Tongue River, where he found shelter in the cold weather and from which he could send war parties out against Fort Phil Kearny on clear days. Following one last big buffalo hunt, Red Cloud prepared to rub out the garrison. He now had over five hundred lodges of Indians gathered together, including a few Gros Ventres; the camp covered a forty-mile stretch of the Tongue Valley. There were smaller camps along the Powder River. In all, Red Cloud had a thousand or more warriors on active duty. For the final offensive, he called up his reserves—the young Brulés and Hang-Around-the-Forts who ordinarily spent the winter at or near the agencies, coming to the Powder River country only during the summer. But in December of 1866, Red Cloud had most of these youngsters with him, swelling the ranks of the hostiles by perhaps as many as a thousand additional warriors. Crazy Horse and his fellow shirt-wearers knew that they could not hope to destroy the whites, despite a nearly six-to-one superiority, unless they could draw a portion of Carrington’s command into the open. All the soldiers had single-shot rifles, while only a handful of warriors possessed firearms. But if a large number of soldiers could be lured into the open, where the Indians could fire volleys of arrows at them or overwhelm them by sheer numbers, using clubs and spears as the principal weapons, something significant could be accomplished

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  Fifty Years on the Old Frontier

  As Cowboy, Hunter, Guide, Scout, and Ranchman

  • James H. Cook(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Papamoa Press

    (Publisher)

  In the 1876 campaign Red Cloud took little if any part. Many warriors from the Red Cloud Agency, however, were with the hostiles, and several old Indians who took part in the fight with Custer’s command, and who have visited me in company with Red Cloud, have told me of the day when they wiped out the courageous general and so many soldiers. Their victory, as they well knew, was due only to their overwhelming numbers and to the fact that the cavalrymen were forced to fight on foot. Red Cloud well knew at this time that war with the whites could result in nothing but suffering and death to many of his people; but he had lost control of many of the bands of Sioux, and they would not heed his pacific suggestions. Some of his sub-chiefs—for example, Crazy Horse—and many of the young men wanted war, and they had to have it. Red Cloud’s popularity waned as others who were more belligerent led the young men on the war trails against the “long knives.” Bad wounds and old age may have had a great deal to do with checking Red Cloud’s warlike spirit at this time; but his judgment in laying down the hatchet at the time when he forsook the warpath was, I think, greater than that of his sub-chief Crazy Horse, who had to make his start for the ghost trail off the point of a bayonet thrust by an unduly excited soldier. When Crazy Horse was killed at Fort Robinson after having been summoned there for a talk with government officials, many of his people felt that it was a most treacherous and cowardly deed, and great efforts were required on the part of Red Cloud and other old men to restrain the warriors from attempting to avenge his death.

  In 1878, when the band of Northern Cheyennes who had been held as prisoners of war at Fort Reno, Indian Territory, broke loose and fought their way back north as far as Red Cloud’s country, their leaders (considered by both the white and the red men who knew them to be the bravest and shrewdest Indian war chieftains who ever lived on our western plains within the history of man) tried their best to persuade Red Cloud and his old sub-chiefs to join them in making a last stand, urging that it would be better to die the death of warriors than be obliged to live like dogs—to be fed such refuse as white men might see fit to give, and to be told where they might and might not go. Red Cloud, however, would not listen to their war talk, and he did everything he could to have the Sioux remain quiet and let the war trail grass over.

  The next so-called Sioux uprising took place in the autumn and winter of 1890-1891. It was caused by the Messiah craze that came to them by way of runners from the Far West. Word had come from the Great Spirit of all Indians that the hated white man was to be wiped off the earth, and that former conditions, such as the return of the buffalo, would follow. They were to dance and pray until such conditions came to pass. The effect of these messages was like that of the arrival and efforts of a great revivalist of the shouting Methodist school, who could soon have great numbers of blind followers under the influence of what he styled “the power.”

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  First Americans: A History of Native Peoples

  • Kenneth W. Townsend(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016). A solid treatment of the Sioux wars for survival, relying heavily on the words of Native Americans and representatives of the United States government at that time.
• Drury, Bob, and Tom Clavin. The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, and American Legend. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013). Based on Red Cloud’s own testimony, this work offers a comprehensive and compelling story of the Oglala Sioux warrior in the defense of his people and nation.
• Gardner, Mark Lee. The Earth Is All That Lasts: Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and the Last Stand of the Great Sioux Nation (Boston, MA & New York: Mariner Books, 2022). A life study of two icons of Native American history that provides greater understanding of their individual roles in resisting westward expansion and waging war when necessary against the U.S. Army during the Great Sioux War of 1876.
• Greene, Jerome. Washita: The U.S. Army and the Southern Cheyenne, 1867–1869 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008). A thorough study of the causes, conduct, and results of the massacre of Cheyenne at the Washita Valley. Greene argues in part that this event contributed directly to the defeat of Custer at Little Big Horn years later.
• Hedren, Paul L. Powder River: Disastrous Opening of the Great Sioux War (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016).
• Marshall, Joseph. The Day the World Ended at Little Big Horn: A Lakota History (New York: Viking, 2006). A thoughtful analysis of the Greasy Grass Fight (Little Big Horn) that examines combat strategy, sources of the Indians’ victory, and post-battle consequences, with emphasis on the Indians’ perspective.
• Monnett, John H. Where a Hundred Soldiers Were Killed: The Struggle for the Powder River Country in 1866 and the Making of the Fetterman Myth