The Bozeman Trail and Red Cloud's War

The road you are traveling overlaps one of the most contested corridors in American history. In eighteen sixty-three, a Virginia-born prospector named John Jacobs and his partner John Bozeman blazed a shortcut from the Oregon Trail north through Wyoming and into Montana's goldfields. It sliced four hundred miles off the journey, but it crossed the heart of the Powder River country, land that the Fort Laramie Treaty of eighteen fifty-one had recognized as Crow territory and that the Lakota and their Cheyenne allies had since taken by conquest and claimed as their own hunting grounds.

The Oglala Lakota chief Maȟpíya Lúta, known to Americans as Red Cloud, warned the United States that any road through that land meant war. The Army ignored him. In eighteen sixty-six it began building three forts along the trail, including Fort Phil Kearny in present-day Wyoming. Red Cloud's warriors responded with relentless pressure. On December twenty-first, eighteen sixty-six, Captain William Fetterman led eighty soldiers out of Fort Phil Kearny in pursuit of a decoy party led by Crazy Horse. Every single soldier was killed in what the Army called the Fetterman Fight and the Lakota remembered as the Battle of the Hundred Slain. It was the worst defeat the United States Army had yet suffered on the northern plains.

For two years the Army could not keep the trail open. Red Cloud's campaign was so effective that the United States did something almost unprecedented: it sued for peace on the Indians' terms. The Fort Laramie Treaty of eighteen sixty-eight ordered the abandonment of all three forts. Soldiers marched out; Lakota warriors burned the structures to the ground before the last column cleared the horizon.

Bozeman himself did not live to see the outcome. He was killed along his own trail in April of eighteen sixty-seven, at the age of thirty-two, in a killing that contemporaries blamed on Blackfeet raiders though historians still dispute who was actually responsible. The trail that bore his name was formally closed the following year. The Gallatin Valley at its northern end, however, had already taken root as a settlement, and the town platted there in eighteen sixty-four carried his name forward.