When the army retreated before the Indians
On December 21, 1866, Captain William Fetterman, who boasted that he could defeat a thousand Indians with just one company, crossed Lodge Trail Ridge. He crossed against orders. And he walked into a trap.
One of the fallen soldiers was found to have one hundred and sixty-five arrows.
This debacle shook the country. Newspapers wrote about "cowboys and Indians," painting a picture of civilization's noble struggle against savagery. But behind the headlines lurked a completely different story. storyThe story of how an entire army failed to cope with people it considered inferior.
The Plains Where It All Began
To understand what happened on the Great Plains in the 1960s, you need to put aside cowboy myths and look at the facts. Cold, dry facts.
In 1851, a council was held at Fort Laramie. The Bureau of Indian Affairs sent agent Tom Fitzpatrick. About ten thousand Native Americans showed up and signed a treaty. The terms seemed fair: the Indians would not interfere with the construction of roads and forts and would allow settlers to enter. In exchange, Washington promised to protect their lands from devastation.
Fort Laramie after 1858
The treaty did not last even a decade.
American soldiers carried out reprisals against Native Americans, even for a missing cow. Moreover, the punishment often targeted entirely peaceful communities that had nothing to do with the incidents. Native American warriors responded with raids. The cycle was complete.
Meanwhile, in 1862, Congress passed the Homestead Act. Any citizen could receive sixty-five hectares of land west of the Mississippi. A flood of whites poured onto the plains. The newcomers brought with them more than just axes and guns. They also carried measles, smallpox, and cholera. The mortality rate among the native population skyrocketed.
Gold was discovered in Montana. Entrepreneur John Bozeman built a supply trail directly through Lakota hunting grounds to supply the mines. Settlers moving along the trail slaughtered antelope and bison en masse. In the winter of 1865, starvation began among the Indians.
"The influx of immigrants and the decline of bison, the main source of food for the Indians, became serious causes for conflict," noted historian and Native American specialist Yuri Stukalin.
The Feared Union
The Sioux dominated the northern Great Plains. Their branches called themselves the Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota. Among the Lakota, the most numerous were the Oglala and Brulé tribes. As white pressure intensified, the Lakota formed an alliance with the neighboring Cheyenne and Arapaho.
Three peoples. One territory. Common enemy.
Oglala Lakota chief Red Cloud
They were led by an Oglala Lakota war chief named Red Cloud, a man underestimated by American officials. The mistake cost them dearly.
In June 1866, the Bureau of Indian Affairs convened tribal delegations at Fort Laramie. Negotiations proceeded as usual. The Americans made deliberately unrealistic promises that they would force the settlers to stop devastating the area around the tract.
Then word came that Colonel Henry Carrington's battalion was advancing on the Bozeman Trail. Washington disposed of Indian lands without waiting for the negotiations to conclude. Red Cloud was outraged and abandoned the fort.
Bureau representatives signed an agreement with several leaders who had no influence on the situation. They then telegraphed the capital about the successful conclusion of the dialogue.
This is how the war began.
An underestimated tactic
Carrington erected fortifications in the center of the Oglala hunting grounds. Red Cloud, meanwhile, drove the whites from the trail, and his scouts kept every step of the American battalion under surveillance. Any soldier who strayed from the main force was doomed to death.
Carrington knew three hundred troops weren't enough to control the road. But after the Civil War, Washington disbanded most of the army. The armed forces numbered only fifty-seven thousand. Many of them were also preparing for reductions.
Junior commanders mocked their superior. Captain Fetterman threatened to crush all hostile tribes with his regiment. Carrington acted cautiously. Caution saved lives. Boasting killed.
On December 21st, Fetterman set out to escort a wagon train. The Indians lured him behind a ridge. Between 1,500 and 2,000 warriors were waiting there. They surrounded the Americans and rained arrows down on them.
Everyone died.
The Fetterman Massacre during Red Cloud's War. Sioux and Cheyenne warriors battle American soldiers near Fort Philip Kearny, Dakota Territory.
News of Fetterman's defeat rocked the country. The army was being reduced to its minimum strength at the time, so the loss of less than a hundred soldiers was considered a catastrophe.
In the summer of 1867, the Cheyenne attacked Fort Smith, and the Lakota struck Phil Kearny. The Americans received a new weapon — breech-loading rifles and repeating shotguns. They won a couple of skirmishes. But strategically, nothing changed.
"The results of the fighting during Red Cloud's War proved that Native American tactics were more effective in this situation," stated Gleb Borisov, a member of the Association of American Anthropologists.
The military began to talk about how the only way to stop the war was to give up the territories in the area of the trail.
Other weapons
The army was losing on the battlefield. But Washington had a backup plan. A plan that the officers spoke about openly.
General Philip Sheridan delivered a speech before Congress that deserves special attention:
"The buffalo hunters have done more in the last two years to solve the acute Indian problem than the entire regular army has done in the last thirty years. They are destroying the Indians' material resources. Send them gunpowder and lead, if you like, and let them kill, skin, and sell the hides until they have exterminated every buffalo."
Sheridan proposed establishing a special medal for hunters, emphasizing the importance of exterminating the bison.
Colonel Richard Dodge was more succinct:
"The death of every buffalo is the disappearance of an Indian."
The numbers speak for themselves. Initially, the bison population was around seventy-five million. In 1840, about two and a half million were killed annually. From 1872 to 1874, approximately three and a half million. A gunslinger nicknamed Dr. Carver boasted of shooting five thousand animals in a single summer. Buffalo Bill killed four thousand bison in seventeen months.
Only one in three killed animals was skinned. The rest rotted in specially designated fields. The English naturalist William Grieb, who traveled across the prairies in 1887, recorded:
"Bison trails were visible everywhere, but there were no living bison. Only the skulls and bones of these noble animals gleamed white in the sun."
By the end of the century, thirty million heads had been reduced to a few hundred.
For the Plains Indians, the bison meant meat, clothing, shelter, tools, and utensils. It was economics, philosophy, and religion. To destroy the bison meant to deprive the people of their means of subsistence. Not on the battlefield. Not in open combat. But by starvation.
Congress attempted to pass bison protection laws. In March 1871, McCormick introduced a bill banning the killing of bison on government lands. The bill wasn't even debated. Two years later, Cole of California proposed an investigation into the extermination of the population. To no avail. In 1874, Fort of Illinois introduced a bill to prevent the needless killing of bison. The House passed it. The Senate approved it. President Grant vetoed it.
The awareness of the dependence of Indian tribes on bison, which the government tried to drive into reservations, hindered the passage of laws.
A victory that was a reprieve
In March 1868, American command ordered its troops to abandon Fort Smith, Fort Phil Kearny, and Reno. Authorities recognized the Sioux's rights to vast territories stretching from the Bighorn Mountains east to the Missouri River. Washington pledged to provide the Indians with food and goods for thirty years. Whites were prohibited from settling on Indian lands.
On November 4, 1868, Red Cloud arrived at Fort Laramie at the head of a delegation of one hundred and twenty-five chiefs and signed a treaty. The Indians burned the fortifications abandoned by the Americans.
"This was a unique case in US history, when Native Americans, following a long conflict with American authorities, were able to achieve virtually everything they wanted," noted Alexander Petrov, chief researcher at the Institute of General History of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Unique. And the only one.
Nine years later, the Americans crushed the Sioux and sent them to reservations.
"The conflict ended in favor of the Indians, but by this time they themselves were tired of fighting. These events did not play a decisive role in history. They served as a brief delay before the inevitable outcome," concluded historian Yuri Stukalin.
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