Red Cloud and the Western Panhandle

The high country out here in the Nebraska panhandle was contested ground from the moment settlers began arriving in force. The western Oglala Lakota, whose domain extended from the Black Hills south into this drainage, had every reason to fight. The Platte River corridor was the main artery of westward migration: the Oregon Trail, the California Trail, the Mormon Trail, all running through what the Lakota understood as their own territory.

Red Cloud, an Oglala leader born around eighteen twenty on the Platte River. He rose to prominence through military campaigns against the Pawnee and later the U.S. Army. Between eighteen sixty-six and eighteen sixty-eight, he led a sustained campaign against the Bozeman Trail, which cut through treaty-protected Lakota hunting grounds in Wyoming. The Army built forts along the trail. Red Cloud's forces attacked the supply lines and the garrisons relentlessly. In December of eighteen sixty-six, at a place called Lodge Trail Ridge in Wyoming, a force of Lakota and Cheyenne warriors annihilated a detachment of eighty-one U.S. soldiers under Captain William Fetterman, the worst military defeat the Army had suffered on the plains to that point. The Army lost every man.

The Fort Laramie Treaty of eighteen sixty-eight was, in significant respects, a U.S. capitulation. The Army agreed to abandon the Bozeman Trail forts. Red Cloud waited until the soldiers left, then reportedly burned the forts himself. The treaty established the Great Sioux Reservation and explicitly named the Powder River country unceded territory.

The Red Cloud Agency, established near present-day Crawford in the Nebraska panhandle in eighteen seventy-one and operated until eighteen seventy-eight, was where Red Cloud and roughly ten thousand Oglala people received government rations during this period. It is one reason this corner of Nebraska carries so much Lakota history. The agency was closed in eighteen seventy-eight when the Oglala were removed north to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, where the Oglala Sioux Tribe is still headquartered today. Casualty figures for the skirmishes of this period vary across sources; specific numbers here reflect widely cited secondary accounts.