The ruthlessness of Harney did not drive the Lakotas to war. In fact, they apparently became better behaved because of the possibility that the aggressive general might be back in full force the following spring. For the remainder of the 1850s, an uneasy truce existed between the Lakotas and the U.S. government. Red Cloud, for one, chose to withdraw with his Oglala band to the Powder River country (in present-day north-central Wyoming and southeastern Montana), where the hunting was still good and the whites were still few.

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Things changed drastically in the 1860s, beginning to the east, where starving and discontented Dakotas (Santee Sioux) led by Mdewakanton Chief Little Crow killed some 700 whites in the Minnesota (Sioux) Uprising. Little Crow himself was killed by white settlers in July 1863, and nearly all the surviving Santees were kicked out of Minnesota into Dakota Territory. By then, the Lakotas had started their own little uprising because white men were traveling to the Montana gold fields on the Bozeman Trail, which cut right through the Powder River hunting grounds. Red Cloud, a’shirt wearer’ (head warrior) of the Oglalas who had counted coup some 80 times, would no longer have only skirmishes with Indian enemies on his mind. War against the whites was on the horizon.

Raids against white emigrants occurred in 1863, and the U.S. government sent Brig. Gens. Henry Hastings Sibley and Alfred Sully, who had subdued the Santees in Minnesota, to attack Lakota camps on the Little Missouri. Things grew worse in 1864, but mostly farther south. Lakotas raided with their Cheyenne and Arapaho allies along the Platte River Road (see related story, P. 32), and then Colorado militiamen slaughtered a village of Cheyennes at Sand Creek that November. Cheyenne, Lakota and Arapaho warriors responded early in 1865 by twice sacking Julesburg and generally spreading death and destruction along the South Platte. The raiders then moved north, where Red Cloud and the other Lakotas in the Powder River country seemed to have it a little better. But not for long. General Sully returned to the upper Missouri for another campaign, and even worse, Brig. Gen. Patrick Edward Connor led one of the three columns that invaded the Powder River country.

The Powder River Expedition of 1865 was a fiasco. Connor did not succeed in engaging the Lakotas in battle, but he did further stir up Red Cloud and his followers. The U.S. government now tried a different tack and gave the free-roaming Lakotas gifts, including arms and ammunition, to come down to Fort Laramie and parley in June 1866. The government’s goal was a peace treaty that would allow gold seekers and others to move freely on the Bozeman Trail. Red Cloud, Man Afraid of His Horses (who was the principal chief) and other Powder River leaders proved to be tough negotiators, especially after they learned the soldiers had already made plans to build three outposts–Forts Reno, Phil Kearny and C.F. Smith–to guard that detested trail. The council failed, and Red Cloud’s status grew in the Indian world as he denounced the way the white man had treated his people and the way the peace commissioners were now treating the Lakota leaders as if they were children.

If Red Cloud–who was not actually a chief–did not yet have a reputation in the white world, that changed in dramatic fashion on December 21, 1866, when he struck a blow that rocked the nation even more than the Grattan Massacre of ‘54 and resulted in the U.S. Army’s most shocking defeat in the Indian wars until the debacle at the Little Bighorn in 1876. Lured away from Fort Phil Kearny by decoy parties, overconfident Captain William J. Fetterman and 80 men were wiped out by the main body of Indians–mostly Lakotas, but also some Cheyennes and Arapahos–in about 40 minutes. During the Indians’ victory celebration, they scalped and mutilated the dead soldiers.

Best known to whites as the Fetterman Massacre, the clash is often referred to today as the Fetterman Fight or the Fetterman Disaster. The 31-year-old captain, who once boasted that with a company of soldiers he ‘could ride through the Sioux Nation,’ certainly left the fort looking for a fight, and despite falling into a trap, he and his men did not go down easily. At least 60 warriors are said to have died on the battlefield. The Indians did not call it Fetterman anything, instead referring to it as the Battle of the Hundred in the Hands or the Battle of the Hundred Slain. It is uncertain whether Red Cloud had a hand in directing the action that cold December day. Historian Robert Utley contends that the Minneconjou High-Back-Bone was the man behind the plan. Crazy Horse, according to most accounts, led one of the decoy parties, but in his recent biography of Crazy Horse, Mike Sajna puts him with the main force, adding: ‘Crazy Horse’s leadership of the Oglala in the Fetterman Fight could be taken as an indication that by the winter of 1866 he had…become head war chief of his people.’

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