438 Chapter 16 The Conquest of the West
Red Cloud, wiped out a party of eighty-two soldiers
under Captain W. J. Fetterman. Red Cloud fought
ruthlessly, but only when goaded by the construction of
the Bozeman Trail, a road through the heart of the
Sioux hunting grounds in southern Montana.^1
In 1867 the government tried a new strategy. The
“concentration” policy had evidently not gone far
enough. All the Plains Indians would be confined to
two small reservations, one in the Black Hills of the
Dakota Territory, the other in Oklahoma, and forced to
become farmers. At two great conclaves held in 1867
and 1868 at Medicine Lodge Creek and Fort Laramie,
the principal chiefs yielded to the government’s
demands and signed the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie.
Many Indians refused to abide by these agree-
ments. With their whole way of life at stake, they raged
across the plains like a prairie fire—and were almost
as destructive.
That a relative handful of “savages,” without cen-
tral leadership, could hold off the cream of the army,
battle-hardened in the Civil War, can be explained by
the fact that the U.S. Army, usually with fewer than
20,000 soldiers, had to operate over a million square
miles. Few Indian leaders were capable of organizing
a campaign or following up an advantage. But the
Indians made superb guerrillas. Every observer called
them the best cavalry soldiers in the world. Armed
with stubby, powerful bows capable of driving an
arrow clear through a bull buffalo, they were a fair
match for troops equipped with carbines and Colt
revolvers. Expertly they led pursuers into ambushes,
swept down on unsuspecting supply details, and stole
up on small parties the way a mountain lion stalks a
grazing lamb. They could sometimes be rounded up,
as when General Philip Sheridan herded the tribes of
the Southwest into Indian Territory in 1869. But
once the troops withdrew, braves began to melt away
into the surrounding grasslands. The distinction
between “treaty” Indians, who had agreed to live on
the new reservations, and the “nontreaty” variety
shifted almost from day to day. Trouble flared here
one week, and the next week somewhere else, perhaps
500 miles away. General William Tecumseh Sherman
testified that a mere fifty Indians could often “check-
mate” 3,000 soldiers.
If one concedes that no one could reverse the
direction of history or stop the invasion of Indian
lands, then some version of the “small reservation”(^1) Fetterman had boasted that with eighty cavalrymen he could ride
the entire length of the Bozeman Trail. When he tried, however, he
blundered into an ambush.
Robert Lindneux’s The Battle of Sand Creek, 1864. Lindneux, born in 1871, did not witness what transpired at Sand Creek, Colorado. But although
he used “battle” in the title of his painting, he depicted a massacre. “Kill and scalp all, big and little,” Colonel J. M. Chivington, a minister in private
life, told his men. The American flag (center right) was doubtless included as irony.