Red Cloud's War

9 Key excerpts on "Red Cloud's War"

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

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

    (Publisher)

  RED CLOUD’S WAR: AN INSURGENCY CASE STUDY FOR MODERN TIMES

  As the Army learned after the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, they’ve done this before. The United States has a history of fighting insurgencies dating back to the mid-19th Century. It is in vogue once again to read historical case studies, particularly those from the 20th Century, to gain insight in how to better prosecute today’s insurgent war in Afghanistan. In fact, most of the principles espoused in FM 3-24, the U.S. Army manual on Counterinsurgency, are based on case studies from the 20th Century.{1} But there’s at least one very long and similar campaign against a similar insurgent foe: the American Indian Wars. Counterinsurgency today, or “COIN” as it is referred to, is a relatively new American term for counterinsurgency, but the fight with insurgents it refers to is much older-even ancient-when referring to irregular enemies.{2} The U.S. Army Indian Wars of the 19th Century, while being similar, remain little studied in today’s COIN academic circles. This paper will specifically be a case study of Red Cloud’s War of 1866, which consisted of the various depredations committed by the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapahoe upon frontier settlements and emigrants between the years 1863 and 1868.{3} Red Cloud’s War remains the only one to have been won by the Indians.{4} While it’s true that Custer’s defeat at the battle of Little Big Horn was a bigger single battle loss, the Indians ultimately lost the overall war. This study will look at the opening of the Bozeman Trail and how it fundamentally changed the history of Wyoming and Montana. And finally, it will take a detailed look at the Fetterman Massacre at Ft. Phil Kearny, Dakota Territory on December 21st

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  The American West

  • Dee Brown(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Scribner

    (Publisher)

  There seemed to be no end to the white men’s shooting. Red Cloud signaled the mounted warriors back, and then the Indians tried again, but the same bloody disaster was repeated. For a time there was a pause while the chieftains conferred. In a last charge, almost a thousand warriors who were without horses came swarming up from out of a ravine, while the mounted warriors came in from the other sides. But they could not storm the hail of lead from the new rifles.

  When a scout informed Red Cloud that a hundred soldiers were coming from the fort armed with howitzers, he ordered his followers to withdraw. The white man’s medicine, this time, had been too strong for him.

  For days, Red Cloud thought he had suffered a defeat. In later years he said he had lost the flower of his fighting warriors and had resolved never to fight again. But back east the news of his resistance had at last made a deep impression upon the officials. The Indian Office reported that the government must either make peace with the Indians north of the Powder River or else flood that section of the country with troops and fight a long, costly war.

  The government chose to make peace. General William T. Sherman, General William S. Harney, General Alfred H. Terry, General C. C. Augur, J. B. Henderson, Nathaniel G. Taylor, John B. Sanborn, and Samuel F. Tappan were appointed commissioners and were sent to Wyoming to draw up a new peace treaty. The trader friends of the Indians were enlisted by the commissioners in their efforts to persuade the chiefs to sign it. Spotted Tail and Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses were ready to sign, but Red Cloud by this time thought of himself as a conqueror. He was scornful of the commissioners, and he and the young hostiles declared they would remain in the Powder River country until the blue-coated soldiers marched away from the forts.

  Finally, in April 1868, in a large tent at Fort Laramie. the terms of the treaty were agreed upon. The U.S. government agreed to withdraw its soldiers from the Bozeman Trail forts. “From this day forward.” the treaty began, “all wars between the parties to this agreement shall forever cease.” Red Cloud signed on November 6, 1868.

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  First Americans: A History of Native Peoples, Combined Volume

  A History of Native Peoples, PowerPoints

  • Kenneth Townsend(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Commissioner of Indian Affairs Edward Smith sent an order to the Sioux living in the westernmost regions that they must report to the Great Sioux Reservation by January 31, 1876, or face forced removal under the army’s direction. Historians have correctly noted that Smith’s order was of questionable legal validity. The Sioux and the Northern Cheyenne were permitted by the Fort Laramie Treaty to live there. They were never required to settle onto the Great Sioux Reservation nor abandon the Powder River region. Even those Indians who considered it wiser to move onto the reservation than face another war found the order’s timing particularly inappropriate. The Indians could not make the journey in winter. The frigid air and abundant snowfall prevented traveling over a terrain difficult to cross even in warm months. And, the precise date, arbitrarily chosen, meant nothing to the Sioux. Their conception of time varied fundamentally from that of white civilization. January 31 meant no more to them than March 31. No Sioux arrived at the reservation by the appointed deadline.

  The Interior Department wasted no time once the date passed. On February 1, it announced the Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho not residing on the reservation to be enemies of the United States. The War Department then instructed General Philip Sheridan to move his armies into the western Sioux country and wage relentless war against the Indians until the “hostiles” surrendered and moved to the Red Cloud Agency.

  The Great Sioux War

  General Sheridan directed his field commanders to implement against the Sioux the same basic plan of war used against the southern plains tribes a few years earlier—a series of pincer movements from multiple directions, pushing the Indians into a small, confined location where they could be destroyed or taken prisoner. The harsh winter of 1876, however, delayed his move against the Indians until spring. In March, General George Crook guided his force into the Powder River, unleashing cavalry units and infantry columns against the Sioux housed along the river near the Big Horn Mountains. In May, he sent his troops up the Bozeman Trail. At the same time, General Alfred Terry ordered his forces into the Dakota Territory and the Yellowstone Valley. Shoshone and Crow warriors and scouts aided the army, seeing in this campaign an opportunity to remove their traditional and common enemy from the territory. Fighting throughout the region proved as brutal as both sides initially anticipated.

  On June 17, Crook’s army and warriors under Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse collided in a fierce, day-long fight at Rosebud Creek that neither side could claim as a victory. Crook’s troops held the field of battle, but the Sioux seriously hurt Crook’s fighting capability, and their dogged resistance encouraged more Indians to join the war against the United States. The Sioux then moved to the banks of the Little Big Horn River, known to the Indians as the Greasy Grass.

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  There Shall We Be Also: Tribal Fractures And Auxiliaries In The Indian Wars Of The Northern Great Plains

  • Major Jason E. Warner(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Normanby Press

    (Publisher)

  HISTORICAL EXAMPLES

  The Crow in Red Cloud’s War: Tribal Support

  “On the eastern borders of Montana, there is a large tribe of Indians known as the Crow Indians, who in the days of the Lewis and Clark expedition were friendly to the whites, and still boast, and rightfully, that they have never killed a white man unless in self-defense. They have habitually warred with the Sioux, and thus screened the feeble white settlement from their incursions.”—Colonel Henry B. Carrington in an address at the 45

  th meeting of the Geographical and Biological Sections of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1875.” {46}

  The Army’s attempt to secure the Bozeman trail in 1866-1868 brings to light the first example of how tribal fractures and competition led to one tribe allying themselves with the US Army against another tribe hostile to the US Army. It also demonstrated how bands do not always follow the policy of their tribe or allies. The events surrounding the US Army’s attempt to secure the Bozeman Trail brought the US Army into contact primarily with the Crow, Cheyenne, and Sioux tribes. The US Army in its operations failed to understand the complexities of the conflict and as a result did not take advantage of the tribal fractures and stresses that existed between the tribes involved. The Crow assisted the US Army against their traditional enemies the Sioux and Cheyenne, but the Army did not maximize their use or establish an official alliance with them.

  The Bozeman trail was a short cut to the gold fields in Montana. John M. Bozeman, attempting to find an easier route to the Montana gold fields, located a pass to the east of Virginia City, Montana in 1862. This pass allowed travelers to go directly east from the gold fields and then by turning south after the Big Horn Mountains link up with the Oregon Trail only seventy miles east of Fort Laramie.{47} This route shaved off many miles of difficult terrain on the established routes. The problem with this new route was that it passed directly through Sioux and Cheyenne territory. In his initial exploration of the trail, Bozeman almost lost his life when captured by the Sioux, but they released him without horses, weapons, and clothes to find his way through the harsh terrain to safety. Undeterred, he successfully brought a freight wagon train through the trail in 1863, but only by traveling at night and doubling back at times to avoid contact with the Sioux. The Sioux contested and confronted any travel on this new route, but the profits in Virginia City proved too great and men risked their lives for the profits provided by this shorter and easier path. The continued use of the Bozeman Trail enraged the Sioux who increased their efforts to preserve this area for hunting and to prevent further white encroachment.{48}

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  American Nations

  Encounters in Indian Country, 1850 to the Present

  • Frederick Hoxie, Peter Mancall, James Merrell(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Bray’s account is notable for its painstaking reconstruction of Indians’ negotiations, and for uncovering the logic that compelled Crazy Horse first to cling to authority during a long, harsh winter and then to relinquish it the following spring. Yet this essay is significant for more than illustrating how, far from backward and bloodthirsty warriors determined to fight to the death, Indians were savvy politicians and diplomats, navigating treacherous historical terrain. It also introduces a new source for exploring the Indian experience. Like the Civil War, the Great Sioux War drew photographers to record key participants. Several pieces appear here, suggesting the new medium’s rich promise, and its genuine problems.

  Kingsley M. Bray

  AS NEW GRASS GREENED THE NORTHERN Plains in the first week of May 1877, events signaled the end of Indian resistance in the Great Sioux War. On May 7, Col. Nelson A. Miles dealt a decisive blow against Lame Deer’s village, the last group of Sioux to try to maintain the old nomadic life in the Lakota hunting grounds of the Powder River Country. Two hundred and fifty miles northward, where the invisible medicine fine of the Forty-ninth Parallel offered a haven from U.S. military pursuit, a larger body of Sioux followed Sitting Bull into exile in Canada. And far to the south, thousands more Sioux and Cheyennes succumbed to the inevitable and surrendered at the garrisons of the Sioux Reservation. The mass capitulations climaxed on Sunday, May 6, when Crazy Horse, the greatest Lakota war leader of his generation, led his village into Red Cloud Agency and symbolically surrendered three Winchester rifles. The Sioux War was over.1

  A wealth of Indian testimony exists that enables us to understand the Great Sioux War from Indian perspectives. Sioux and Cheyenne combatants, and their relatives who served as army scouts or acted as peace negotiators, have left a vast body of source material from which we can reconstruct Indian motivations. Some of these accounts are the result of military debriefings within weeks of the events which they describe; others are recollections recorded by the pioneer historians of the Indian wars early in the twentieth century. Like all historical sources they need rigorous evaluation and careful weighing to detect bias and inconsistency. The special problems posed by translation must always be borne in mind in Indian history.

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  The Native American Experience

  Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, The Fetterman Massacre, and Creek Mary's Blood

  • Dee Brown(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Open Road Media

    (Publisher)

  On December 6, a day with a cold wash of air flowing down the slopes of the Bighorns, High Back Bone and Yellow Eagle took about a hundred warriors and dispersed them at various points along the pinery road. Red Cloud was with another group of warriors who took positions along the ridgetops. They flashed mirrors and waved flags to signal the movements of the troops to High Back Bone and his decoys. Before the day was over, the Indians had the Bluecoats dashing about in all directions. At one time the Little White Chief Carrington came out and gave chase. Choosing just the right moment, Crazy Horse dismounted and showed himself on the trail in front of one of Carrington’s hot-blooded young cavalry officers, who immediately led a file of soldiers galloping in pursuit. As soon as the soldiers were strung out along the narrow trail, Yellow Eagle and his warriors sprang from concealment in their rear. In a matter of seconds the Indians swarmed over the soldiers. (This was the fight in which Lieutenant Horatio Bingham and Sergeant G. R. Bowers were killed and several soldiers severely wounded.)

  In their camps that night and for several days following, the chiefs and warriors talked of how foolishly the Bluecoats had acted. Red Cloud was sure that if they could entice a large number of troops out of the fort, a thousand Indians armed with only bows and arrows could kill them all. Sometime during the week, the chiefs agreed that after the coming of the next full moon they would prepare a great trap for the Little White Chief and his soldiers.

  By the third week of December everything was in readiness, and about two thousand warriors began moving south out of the lodges along the Tongue. The weather was very cold, and they wore buffalo robes with the hair turned in, leggings of dark woolen cloth, high-topped buffalo-fur moccasins, and carried red Hudson’s Bay blankets strapped to their saddles. Most of them rode pack horses, leading their fast-footed war ponies by lariats. Some had rifles, but most were armed with bows and arrows, knives, and lances. They carried enough pemmican to last several days, and when an opportunity offered, small groups would turn off the trail, kill a deer, and take as much meat as could be carried on their saddles.

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  "Farewell, My Nation"

  American Indians and the United States in the Nineteenth Century

  • Philip Weeks(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Army patrols had been ineffective in keeping Americans out of the Great Sioux Reservation. On the other hand, the Sioux were becoming progressively bitter at the gold hunters and at the repeated treaty violations. Secretary of War William W. Belknap assessed the emergency: recent reports “fore‐shadow trouble between the miners and the Indians of the country known as the Black Hills, unless something be done to obtain possession of that section; for the white miners have been strongly attracted there by the reports of rich deposits of the precious metal.” The United States government concluded that it could not successfully defend the territorial and treaty rights of the Sioux. It appeared just a matter of time before the Sioux would take matters into their own hands and eradicate any prospectors whom they found on their land. Indian Bureau, military, and congressional officials all now agreed that the way to end the predicament was to purchase the Black Hills from the Sioux. In September 1875, a delegation of key congressional and military officials journeyed to the Red Cloud agency near the reservation. They planned to discuss the hoped‐for purchase of the Black Hills with leaders like Red Cloud and Spotted Tail. The delegation also dispatched messengers ahead of themselves requesting the attendance of the off‐reservation leaders Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. The latter replied that they would not come to the meeting nor would they authorize the sale of one foot of their land to the United States. “I want you to go and tell the Great Father that I do not want to sell any land to the government,” The Plains Wars, Phase II: Enforcing Concentration 245 Sitting Bull told the hapless messenger. “Not even this much,” he added defiantly, waving a pinch of earth in the man’s face. In spite of his characteristic obstinacy, the commissioners confidently believed they could persuade Red Cloud to sell the Black Hills.

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  Operational Art In The Sioux War Of 1876

  • Major James W. Shufelt Jr.(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Normanby Press

    (Publisher)

  Army. Under the terms of the treaty, the Army abandoned the existing forts in the unceded territory. The treaty also created controversy over the exact status of the unceded lands; it was unclear whether these lands were part of the reservation or a new type of territory. The Army’s response in this situation was rapid and severe. Reasoning that the unceded lands were not part of the reservation. Sheridan affirmed the Army’s authority over Indians off the reservations with a 29 July 1869 order stating that if Indians are “… outside the well-defined limits of the reservation they are under the original and exclusive jurisdiction of the military authority; and as a rule will be considered hostile.” {42} Despite this order, however, Sheridan was precluded from conducting military operations in the unceded territory except at the request of the Indian Bureau. This treaty also had a major effect on the Sioux Indians. {43} Many Sioux resented the Treaty’s creation of a reservation, disclaiming the government’s authority to specify bounds to traditional Indian lands. As a result, the influence of the leading Sioux Chief who had agreed to the treaty, Red Cloud, began to decline, and many young Sioux warriors assumed increased leadership in tribal affairs. Among these new leaders were several who would play key roles in the Sioux War of 1876: Gall. Black Man, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull. {44} Despite the treaty, it was apparent to the nation’s leadership that conflict with the Sioux was inevitable. The primary inspiration for this conflict was the Black Hills, at once a Sioux holy land and an area coveted by the American public, convinced that the area held great agricultural and mineral wealth. {45} In 1874 a government expedition had traveled into the Black Hills for the explicit purpose of locating potential fort sites: the expedition also included two civilian prospectors. Although the only limited amounts of minerals were discovered the public response was frantic

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