Red Cloud's War was an armed conflict between the Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Native American tribes and the United States which occurred from 1866 to 1868 in Wyoming and Montana amid the Plains Indian Wars. The war ended with the Treaty of Fort Laramie, the only peace treaty signed between the Native Americans and the United States government which acknowledged a Native victory.
History[]
In 1863, white American settlers blazed the Bozeman Trail through the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota heartlands in the northern Great Plains, connecting Fort Laramie and the Oregon Trail to the Montana gold fields. From 1864 to 1866, 3,500 miners and settlers traversed the trail and competed with the natives for the diminishing resources near the trail, and the US Army established forts in response to attacks on civilian travelers. From 1866 to 1868, the Natives - partly led by the Sioux war chief Red Cloud - launched small-scale raids and attacks on American soldiers and civilians in the Powder River country, resulting in an astounding US defeat in "Fetterman's Fight" in December 1866, during which a force of 81 US soldiers under Captain William J. Fetterman was lured off the Bozeman Trail and into an ambush which not a single soldier survived. In 1868, the US government and Red Cloud concluded the Treaty of Fort Laramie, which granted the natives control of the western Powder River country, took down the US Army forts, and permanently closed the Bozeman Trail. However, eight years later, war would once again break out in the Black Hills due to another influx of white settlers, this time because of the Black Hills Gold Rush.