Red Cloud

Red Cloud was born around 1822 near the forks of the Platte River, in what is now western Nebraska. His parents, Lone Man and Walks as She Thinks, died within a few years of his birth, and Lakota custom sent the boy to his mother's brother, Old Chief Smoke, head of the Bad Face band of the Oglala. He grew up fighting Pawnee and Crow raiders, building a reputation for courage owed nothing to rank, since the Lakota recognized no hereditary chiefs. In 1850 he married Pretty Owl, later recorded as Mary Good Road. By his forties he led the Bad Faces and had absorbed enough of the wider world, through trade and travel, to grasp what an advancing railroad and gold rush threatened.

Red Cloud led the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho campaign against the forts strung along the Bozeman Trail into Montana gold country. The war's decisive action came on December 21, 1866, when Crazy Horse, acting under Red Cloud's broader strategy, decoyed Captain William Fetterman's detachment into an ambush that killed all 81 soldiers. The Army held out two more years before agreeing to abandon Forts Reno, Phil Kearny, and C. F. Smith outright. Red Cloud refused to sign the resulting Fort Laramie Treaty until the forts stood empty, adding his mark last, on November 6, 1868, months after the government's own commissioners had signed in April. It was the only war the United States fought against Native nations and lost outright, on terms the other side set. What followed the peace, not the war, is the harder story.

Winning the war did not mean Red Cloud kept deciding how the peace worked. A trip to Washington in 1870 convinced him further resistance was suicidal; many of his own people, including his son, read that as surrender and left the agency to fight beside Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull in the war that ended at the Little Bighorn in 1876. Red Cloud sat that one out and spent the next two decades fighting in a different arena, Washington's, against the 1887 Dawes Act and an 1889 treaty breaking up the Great Sioux Reservation. Agents got the signatures they needed anyway, partly from the marks of children. He watched the Black Hills, promised by treaty and by his own refusal of a 25,000 dollar buyout in 1875, taken by congressional act three years after Custer found gold there.

Red Cloud died at Pine Ridge on December 10, 1909, having outlived nearly every leader who fought beside or against him. Early white historians turned him into the 'Red Napoleon of the Plains,' a singular commander the decentralized Lakota never had, and 128 surviving photographs, more than any other 19th-century Native American, fed a myth of one chief standing for a whole nation. The record since has corrected that without diminishing the war he actually won. In 1980 the Supreme Court ruled the 1877 Black Hills seizure illegal and ordered compensation; the Lakota have refused the money, now worth more than a billion dollars, because Red Cloud's own treaty promised them the land, not a payout.

Red Cloud's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Red Cloud's War other
  Campaign against the Bozeman Trail forts, forced their abandonment by 1868 1866
• Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 other
  Established the Great Sioux Reservation including the Black Hills 1868
• Red Cloud Agency other
  Administrative center he settled near on the Platte River 1871
• Holy Rosary Mission (Red Cloud Indian School) building
  Jesuit school he invited onto Pine Ridge, believing education was necessary for Lakota survival 1888

• c. 1822 aged ~0 Born near the forks of the Platte River
• 1850 aged ~28 Marries Pretty Owl
• December 21, 1866 aged ~44 The Fetterman Fight kills all 81 soldiers in the ambushed detachment Crazy Horse led the decoy; Red Cloud directed the wider campaign.
• November 6, 1868 aged ~46 Signs the Fort Laramie Treaty last, after the forts stand empty
• 1870 aged ~48 Visits Washington, D.C., and meets President Grant
• 1875 aged ~53 Refuses a 25,000 dollar offer for the Black Hills
• 1876 aged ~54 Declines to join the Great Sioux War as his son leaves to fight
• 1889 aged ~67 Opposes a treaty breaking up the Great Sioux Reservation Agents obtained the needed signatures anyway, in part from children.
• December 10, 1909 aged ~87 Dies at Pine Ridge Reservation

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• William Tecumseh Sherman 1820–1891
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• Vine Deloria Jr. 1933–2005
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