An 1862 gold strike in the Bannack area had already exacerbated the strained relations between Indians and white intruders. It had led to the development of the controversial Bozeman Trail, which was blazed through what would become Wyoming to connect the Oregon Trail with the promising Montana Territory gold fields. The Powder River country, which was directly in the path of the Bozeman Trail, was a treasured Lakota hunting ground wrested from the Crows. When the Army built forts along the trail to protect the gold seekers, the great Oglala Sioux leader Red Cloud besieged two of the forts. The effort by the soldiers at Fort Phil Kearny (in present-day Wyoming) to lift the siege at their post led to the December 21, 1866, Fetterman Fight, in which Captain William Judd Fetterman and approximately 80 of his men perished in an ambush engineered by Crazy Horse and his mentor, Minneconjou Sioux Chief High-Back-Bone (also known as Hump). Six months later, another attack by Cheyenne warriors, known as the Hayfield Fight, showed that Fort C.F. Smith in Montana Territory was also vulnerable.

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Gall’s participation in these Powder River hostilities was probably limited. In late 1865, he was almost killed while encamped near Fort Berthold, in what would become North Dakota, where he had hoped to trade with Arikara Indians. He was spotted by Bloody Knife, who would later become Custer’s favorite scout. Bloody Knife, whose mother was Arikara, had lived in his father’s Hunkpapa camp and grown up with Gall and Sitting Bull. A deep animosity developed between him and Gall and lasted until Bloody Knife’s death at the Little Bighorn in 1876. Harboring old resentments against Gall, Bloody Knife led a detachment of soldiers from the fort to Gall’s tepee. There, the unsuspecting Hunkpapa war chief was bayoneted in a vicious attack that almost cost him his life.

Largely because of Gall’s iron constitution, he survived his wounds to play an important role in the ratification of the Fort Laramie Treaty in 1868. Because of Red Cloud’s tenacious campaign against the intrusive Bozeman Trail, this treaty not only closed the forts along the trail but also gave the Lakotas an enormous tract of land, which was later called the Great Sioux Reservation. It encompassed all of western South Dakota, including the Black Hills, and provided annuities for those Indians who agreed to live there. The treaty also set aside as ‘unceded Indian territory’ the Powder River country in Wyoming. Although most of the southern Lakota tribesmen were willing to live on the new reservation, a number of northern ones, including many Hunkpapas, were not.

The federal government even sent the intrepid Jesuit missionary Father Pierre-Jean DeSmet to Gall and Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa village to discuss the Fort Laramie Treaty. Only an imposing escort of strong-willed leaders, such as Gall and Sitting Bull, saved the popular priest from a possible assassination attempt at this tense meeting. In the end, Sitting Bull and the other leading chiefs refused to attend a July 1868 conference to ratify the treaty.

Sitting Bull did, however, send a delegation headed by Gall to Fort Rice for the conference, probably as a courtesy to Father DeSmet. Gall not only denounced with eloquence the treaty but also threw off his blanket to reveal his ugly wounds that had been inflicted by Army bayonets at Fort Berthold. But a generous offering of gifts induced Gall and the other delegates to agree to the treaty. Many of the older Hunkpapa chiefs were critical of Gall’s surprise turnabout. Yet Sitting Bull, who truly understood his valued protg, was not. ‘You should not blame Gall,’ he remarked. ‘Everyone knows he will do anything for a square meal.’

Neither Gall nor Sitting Bull understood the binding nature of a treaty. In fact, at an 1869 meeting on the Rosebud, involving many Lakotas who had rejected the Fort Laramie Treaty, it was decided to organize all nontreaty Indians in an effort to protect their traditional way of life. Sitting Bull was made supreme chief; Crazy Horse, an Oglala warrior who had broken with Red Cloud, became his chief lieutenant; and Lakota leaders such as Gall and Crow King were made war chiefs.

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