Fort Phil Kearny: Red Cloud Won

In the summer of eighteen sixty-six, Colonel Henry Carrington led a force of infantry into the Powder River country of Wyoming and began building a fort. The United States Army intended to protect the Bozeman Trail, a road that cut through Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho hunting grounds on its way to the gold fields of Montana. The Lakota leader Red Cloud had told American negotiators at Fort Laramie that he would fight any attempt to put forts on this land. Carrington began building anyway.

Red Cloud did not bluff. For the next two years, his warriors and their allies maintained a sustained campaign against Fort Phil Kearny and the two other Bozeman Trail forts, attacking supply parties, running off livestock, and keeping the garrison in a near-constant state of siege.

On December twenty-first, eighteen sixty-six, roughly one thousand warriors concealed themselves in ravines north of the fort. A small decoy party attacked a woodcutting detail, drawing out Captain William Fetterman with eighty soldiers to provide relief. Fetterman had reportedly boasted that with eighty good men he could ride through the entire Sioux nation. He was given exactly eighty men. He followed the decoys over a ridge and into the concealment. Every soldier was killed. The Lakota called it the Battle of the Hundred in the Hands, a number drawn from a vision that foretold exactly how many soldiers would fall.

It was the worst defeat the United States Army had suffered at the hands of Plains Indian forces up to that point. The Little Bighorn was still ten years away.

In eighteen sixty-eight, the United States signed the Fort Laramie Treaty, which established the Great Sioux Reservation, permanently closed the Bozeman Trail, and required the Army to abandon the forts. Red Cloud signed only after he had personally verified that the soldiers were gone. When they were, the forts were burned. Red Cloud had started a war specifically to shut down a road, and he had done it.