The Bozeman Trail and Red Cloud's War
Near Sheridan, Wyoming
The land around Sheridan was not empty when the first wagon ruts cut north. It was the heart of Lakota and Northern Cheyenne territory, and the road that crossed it would ignite one of the most successful Native military campaigns in American history.
In eighteen sixty-three, a Virginia City miner named John Bozeman scouted a shortcut from the Oregon Trail up through the Powder River Basin to the Montana goldfields. The route was faster than the mountain detour to the west. It was also directly through land guaranteed to the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho by the Fort Laramie Treaty of eighteen fifty-one. Red Cloud, an Oglala Lakota leader, made his position plain: the road would not stand.
The United States Army built three forts along the trail to protect the flow of emigrants. Fort Reno, Fort Phil Kearny, and Fort C. F. Smith were garrisoned through eighteen sixty-six and eighteen sixty-seven. Red Cloud's warriors kept them in a state of near-constant siege. Woodcutting parties were ambushed. Supply wagons were harassed. The forts themselves became islands of danger in a landscape controlled by the people defending it.
The pressure worked. In the summer of eighteen sixty-eight, the United States government agreed to abandon all three forts and close the Bozeman Trail entirely. Red Cloud had won. It remains one of the only instances in American history where the United States signed a treaty ceding ground it had tried to take by force. The Fort Laramie Treaty of eighteen sixty-eight recognized Lakota sovereignty over the Black Hills and the Powder River Basin.
The peace lasted only until eighteen seventy-four, when George Custer's expedition confirmed gold in the Black Hills and the land rush began again. But for six years, this ground belonged to those who had held it, and the wagon road that tried to cross it was reclaimed by grass.
