What led to the Fetterman Fight?
The factors that led to Red Cloud’s War, climaxed by the Fetterman Fight in 1866, are many. Certainly the determination of the federal government to provide a cost-effective route to the Montana gold country via the Bozeman Trail across the Powder River country and through prime hunting ranges of the Lakotas is significant. What often goes unstated are the ecological advantages the Powder River country offered to Indian people in terms of not only game abundance, but wood and water resources as well. It was prized land for both Lakotas and Crows. The Lakotas and Northern Cheyennes wrested these lands from their Crow enemies in a bloody war in 1856–1858. Barely half a decade later, here come the whites. With fresh memories of the casualties and other costs of the Crow War, the Lakotas and Cheyennes were not about to let the whites wrest the Powder River country from them.

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Did the fight affect incursion into the Powder River Basin?
The Fetterman Fight called attention to how utterly unprotected travel on the Bozeman Trail really was because of the federal economies in manpower and weaponry during the immediate post–Civil War years. Although breechloading rifles had reached the forts on the Bozeman Trail by 1867, and troops effectively defended themselves in the Hayfield and Wagon Box fights, the only whites the troops were protecting by that time were themselves. The Union Pacific Railroad had reached toward Salt Lake City by 1867, making the route north from Utah shorter. The government closed the Bozeman Trail to civilian traffic in January 1867. Throughout Red Cloud’s War the Indians held the balance of power in the Powder River country.

How were the tribes impacted?
By 1868 the federal government was quite willing to temporarily concede the Powder River country to Red Cloud, since the forts were by then obsolete. But although Red Cloud technically won the war, he lost the peace. The convoluted Treaty of 1868, negotiated at Fort Laramie, made the Lakotas “reservation Indians” and had hidden provisions allowing the government to build roads and withdraw the so-called unceded hunting ranges in the Powder River country at some later date. The same year the treaty went into effect, the government created Wyoming Territory, indicating the intention to eventually open the Powder River country to white settlement. When gold was discovered in the Black Hills five years later, the Powder River country would once again become contested land during the Great Sioux War of 1876–77.

What did you learn about Crazy Horse’s role in the fight?
The biggest surprise I had in researching my book on the Powder River conflict of 1866 revolved around the actions of Crazy Horse. I was excited about the prospect of uncovering new tidbits of information about his legendary actions as a decoy on Lodge Trail Ridge at the start of the Fetterman Fight. To my shock, I found just the opposite. Of course, the military primary sources don’t mention Crazy Horse at the Fetterman Fight, because none of the officers at Fort Phil Kearny had heard of him yet, and those who encountered him at the fight didn’t live to tell about it. All primary source materials on the fight, once the battle reached Lodge Trail Ridge, are Indian eyewitness testimonies. Virtually no Indian original source suggests Crazy Horse was in the Fetterman Fight, let alone participating as a decoy. Fellow Oglala American Horse was a decoy, and possibly George Sword was, too. They were interviewed at a later date, and none mention Crazy Horse.

So where did the erroneous accounts originate?
The stories we hear today I traced back to Mari Sandoz, in her novel Crazy Horse, Strange Man of the Oglalas, published in 1942. If Sandoz had access to any aged warriors or children of warriors at that late date who remembered Crazy Horse in the elaborate detail she described in her novel regarding the Fetterman Fight, she did not have the presence of mind to credit them by name or in any other way in her book. Also, no information is present in her notes she transcribed for Eleanor Hinman when the two women interviewed He Dog and other aged Lakotas regarding their memories of Crazy Horse during the 1930s. Most modern stories of Crazy Horse’s exploits at the Fetterman Fight that I’ve heard or read echo Sandoz’ vivid prose. Of course, this in no way diminishes Crazy Horse’s stature.

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