The Grattan Fight: Where the Plains Wars Began

On August nineteenth, eighteen fifty-four, a young Army lieutenant marched twenty-nine soldiers and two cannons into an encampment of four thousand Lakota Sioux just east of Fort Laramie. Every one of them was dead by sundown. The event that unfolded in this valley along the North Platte River set off a generation of warfare on the northern plains.

It began with a cow. A Minneconjou man named High Forehead had killed a lame ox abandoned by a Mormon emigrant on the Oregon Trail. Under the terms of the eighteen fifty-one Fort Laramie Treaty, the proper remedy was straightforward: the Lakota's own chief, Conquering Bear, had already offered the soldier in question any horse from his personal herd of sixty animals. The emigrant refused and demanded twenty-five dollars in cash instead.

Rather than wait for the government's Indian agent, Lieutenant John Grattan, twenty-four years old and fresh from West Point, volunteered to arrest High Forehead himself. Grattan was openly contemptuous of the Sioux and had boasted he could whip the entire nation with a handful of men. His interpreter arrived at the camp drunk and made the situation worse by taunting the warriors.

Grattan's cannon fire wounded Conquering Bear fatally. Within minutes the Brule Lakota returned fire and killed every soldier in the detachment. The American press called it a massacre and demanded punishment. A year later, General William Harney led a punitive expedition that slaughtered a Lakota village at Blue Water Creek in Nebraska, killing eighty-six people, mostly women and children.

Historians today often call this the opening battle of the First Sioux War, and the first serious fracture in the post-eighteen fifty-one peace. The disputes that began here over a lame cow would not be fully resolved on these plains for another forty years.