Whatever roles they played in Fetterman’s failure, Red Cloud, Crazy Horse and other leaders remained on the offensive, intent on driving the white soldiers out of Lakota land. On August 1, 1867, a Northern Cheyenne war party, along with some Lakota warriors, attacked a group of hay-cutting soldiers near Fort C.F. Smith. The very next day, a large war party of Lakotas, including Red Cloud and Crazy Horse, attacked the wagon camp of some wood-cutting soldiers about five miles from Fort Phil Kearny. Both attacks failed in the end because most of the troops were armed with new Springfield breechloaders and because relief columns arrived from the forts.

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Although the Hayfield Fight and Wagon Box Fight were victories by the whites, the Powder River Indians were hardly defeated. They kept the soldiers bottled up in their isolated forts and continued to deny emigrants use of the Bozeman Trail. U.S. government officials became intent on reaching a settlement with the warring Lakotas and friends. But Red Cloud wouldn’t come to Fort Laramie to sign the treaty. There was one big sticking point. ‘When we see the soldiers moving away and the forts abandoned, then I will come down and talk,’ said Red Cloud. In the summer of 1868, he got his wish. The soldiers abandoned the three forts on the Bozeman Trail, and the Indians promptly burned down Forts C.F. Smith and Phil Kearny. Red Cloud finally arrived at Fort Laramie that November to sign the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. The Lakotas were granted a great territory that included the Black Hills and hunting privileges in the Powder River country. Red Cloud’s War (1866-68) was over, and he had won. He was the first Indian leader to win a war against the United States–and the last.

Between 1868 and 1876, the Lakotas were–at least to white Americans–not quite so warlike. While they continued to skirmish with the likes of the Shoshones and the Crows, they were at peace with the United States, in accordance with President Ulysses S. Grant’s peace policy. Relations remained strained, though, and Red Cloud did a lot of complaining in Washington and elsewhere as the spokesman not only for the Oglalas but also for the entire Lakota Nation. The Indian Bureau wanted the Lakotas to make the transition to reservation life and live like white settlers. In 1873, the government consented to build two agencies in northwestern Nebraska–the Red Cloud Agency for the Oglalas and the Spotted Tail Agency for the Brulés–outside the Great Sioux Reservation. The U.S. government’s peace with Red Cloud would last, but other Lakotas rejected the forced lifestyle changes, the dependence on annuities delivered by ineffective and corrupt administrators, and the Army’s reluctance to keep white gold seekers out of the Black Hills. Many of Red Cloud’s followers now turned to men like Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse–Lakotas who were still willing to fight the white intrusion with more than just words.

Sitting Bull, like most of the other Hunkpapas, had been living and hunting up in Yellowstone River country and was not directly involved in the Red Cloud War. But like the older Red Cloud, Sitting Bull was firmly against white intrusions into the northern Plains. In the aftermath of the Minnesota Uprising, he had skirmished with General Sibley during the summer of 1863 and had tried to defend the Little Missouri River camp that was successfully attacked by General Sully on July 28, 1864, in the Battle of Killdeer Mountain (near present-day Killdeer, N.D.). During General Connor’s three-pronged Powder River expedition the following year, Sitting Bull helped thwart the marches of both Colonel Nelson Cole’s column and Colonel Samuel Walker’s column.

After rejecting the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, Sitting Bull became the recognized leader of not only the Hunkpapa bands but also all the other nontreaty Lakotas–Indians who were officially viewed as ‘hostile’ once they failed to obey the order to report to the reservations by January 31, 1876. The U.S. Army sent soldiers to find these winter roamers. The Great Sioux War of 1876-77 was about to begin.

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