Tecumseh rallied many Indians to the British cause and helped capture Detroit during the War of 1812, but he fell on October 5, 1813, at the Battle of the Thames (near present-day Thamesville, Ontario, Canada), while shouting encouragement to his warriors. The leading proponent of Indian unity was gone, and there was no one to replace him to oppose white settlement east of the Mississippi River.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in Wild West magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

Half a century passed, and whites began to appear in droves west of the Mississippi. Red Cloud, was born about a decade after Tecumseh's death, and his Oglala Sioux followers were willing to talk with the whites. There could be peace if the white man stayed out of Sioux hunting grounds and stopped using the Bozeman Trail.

The government called a council for the spring of 1866 at Fort Laramie, on the Platte River not far from the Wyoming-Nebraska border. Negotiations seemed to be going well until Red Cloud and his chiefs found out that Colonel Henry B. Carrington had arrived with 700 soldiers to build forts on the Bozeman Trail. The Federal peace commission learned that there could be no peace unless a treaty had the support of Red Cloud, who was respected not only by the Oglalas but also by the Bruls and other Sioux and by their Cheyenne allies. 'The Great Father sends us presents and wants us to sell him the road, but the white chief goes with soldiers to steal the road before Indians say Yes or No,' said Red Cloud. He then stormed out of the Laramie meeting.

A real war began, with Red Cloud the head soldier. Red Cloud was the only Plains Indian who could gather so many confederates and keep them together long enough to wage a successful campaign against the white man's incursions. He gathered 250 lodges of Sioux and Cheyennes in the cause, which provided him with about 500 warriors, and carried on continuous guerrilla warfare along the length of the Bozeman Trail. Seventy white people were killed, 20 wounded, and 700 horses, mules and cattle were taken. The soldiers stuck close to their forts.

The Great White Father had to do something, so in 1868 he sent out a peace commission. Whites, according to the Fort Laramie Treaty, were to be banned from Sioux hunting grounds, and their forts were to be abandoned. After the soldiers left, the Indians had the satisfaction of burning the hated forts. The so-called Red Cloud War had been a victory for the Indians. There was relative peace until gold was discovered in the Black Hills in the mid-1870s and the government failed to keep out the white prospectors. Red Cloud, who had come to recognize the hopelessness of challenging the overwhelming numbers of the white man, did not 'go shooting,' and that angered many of his people. Although he came to believe in compromise rather than war, Red Cloud never stopped fighting to protect the Sioux culture. Unlike Tecumseh, he did not go out in a blaze of glory. Red Cloud lived until 1909. But like Tecumseh, he had effectively resisted the white invasion…for a while.

The Hunkpapa leader and holy man Sitting Bull replaced Red Cloud as the chief symbol of resistance on the northern Plains. Born in March 1831 near the Grand River (in today's South Dakota), Sitting Bull tried to avoid whites until the situation became intolerable. Then he called for action, and many Sioux, Cheyennes and Arapahos were happy to follow his lead.

In 1868 many divisions of the Sioux rejected Red Cloud's peace with the United States and did something they had never done before — choosing one man to be the leader of all the Teton Sioux. His name was Sitting Bull. Crazy Horse, a leading warrior, was essentially second in command. The Fort Laramie Treaty, however, largely kept an uneasy peace until all Indians were ordered to go to reservations by January 31, 1876, or be deemed 'hostiles.'

That March, one of the columns of Brig. Gen. George Crook attacked a Cheyenne village not even on the list of hostiles. The survivors made their way to Sitting Bull up in Powder River country, and he gave them food and shelter. He decided the time for patience was gone. Sitting Bull sent messages to all Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho bands. He wanted them to join him.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to