Battle of Wolf Mountains

The winter of eighteen seventy-six to seventy-seven was the Army's relentless push to finish what the Little Bighorn had interrupted. After Custer's defeat in June, public anger drove a punishing winter campaign into the Powder River Basin and the Wolf Mountains along the Montana-Wyoming border, country visible from the high ground north of Sheridan.

Colonel Nelson Miles was the Army's most aggressive pursuer. He had spent the fall harassing Sitting Bull's camp and pushing the Lakota and Northern Cheyenne through brutal cold. On January eighth, eighteen seventy-seven, Miles caught Crazy Horse's Northern Cheyenne and Oglala Lakota camp in the Wolf Mountains during a snowstorm.

The battle was brief and tactically inconclusive. Miles's artillery fired into the ridgelines where the warriors had positioned themselves. The Native fighters withdrew in good order, and Miles did not pursue through the snow. In purely military terms it was a draw. But the strategic exhaustion was not. The village had been on the move for months, short on ammunition and horses. The women and children were hungry. Crazy Horse's people were tired.

Five months after Wolf Mountains, on May sixth, eighteen seventy-seven, Crazy Horse led approximately nine hundred Oglala Lakota into Camp Robinson in Nebraska and surrendered. He was killed there in September, fatally wounded in a struggle after he resisted being placed in a guardhouse. Witnesses gave conflicting accounts of exactly how the fatal wound was inflicted.

The Wolf Mountains today are ranching and reservation land, crossed by two-lane highways rather than cavalry columns. The battle site sits in what is now the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana, roughly seventy miles north of Sheridan. Miles would go on to command the Army during the Ghost Dance crisis of eighteen ninety and the massacre at Wounded Knee. He was one of only two officers to formally protest it afterward.