THE VICTORY over Fetterman may have been sweet for the Indians, but the fort itself was still there, as were two others: Fort Reno and Fort C. F. Smith, all three in the heart of country that the Sioux felt was their own. Throughout the winter of 1866–67 the Indians kept a certain pressure on these forts, but, after Fetterman, the soldiers were cautious; about all the Sioux could do was make it difficult for them to gather firewood. To Red Cloud and the other Indian leaders the very presence of these forts was intolerable. In July of 1867, with Crazy Horse and a large force of warriors, Red Cloud attacked a kind of mini-fort that had been set up on the edge of the Bighorns, where wood could be cut in abundance. This little encampment, under the command of a Captain Powell, had only about forty men, but the wagons had been pulled into a tight circle and fortified with boxes stacked in and under them. The battle that ensued was thus called the Wagon Box Fight. The Indians picked off a few woodcutters, but the charge against the mini-fort failed. The soldiers were good marksmen, with plenty of ammunition. Had the Indians tried hitting the little troop from two sides at once, they might have overwhelmed them, but they didn’t try that, and Captain Powell could not be induced to come out and play, as Fetterman had been. The Indians lost several warriors and the army regained a certain amount of face.
In the fall of 1867 General Sherman made a whirlwind tour of the prairies. He went up the Missouri and talked with Sitting Bull’s people, parleyed with Spotted Tail in Nebraska, hurried south to Kansas, where he talked with the southern Cheyennes, the Arapahos, the Comanches, and the Kiowas, and then came back to Fort Laramie to talk, he hoped, with the Oglalas. Hurrying up and down the plains in pursuit of a general peace, Sherman preached farming, telling the Indians that it was finally time to give up the chase. The Indians were neither impressed nor persuaded. They hemmed and they hawed.
The peace commissioners, in approaching the Oglalas, caused a bit of awkwardness by asking for Red Cloud by name; in their eyes the struggle for the Powder River had become his war. To the Sioux and the Cheyennes, it was not that simple. The “war” had consisted of a number of skirmishes and a few battles, some of which Red Cloud fought in and some of which he didn’t. He was neither the first Indian nor the last to discover that popularity—or at least prominence—with the whites was apt to complicate relations back home.
To the Sioux and the Cheyennes the struggle for the Powder River was their war, not Red Cloud’s, who at this point, though a respected war leader, was not a Big Belly or a man with any special moral authority. Their most respected man was still Old Man Afraid, and it was he who finally journeyed to Fort Laramie to talk with Sherman and the peace commissioners. Old Man Afraid agreed to nothing, but he did let the dignitaries know that peace was not likely until the forts along the Powder River were removed, a step the government was not willing to take—not yet. General Sherman, who had talked to Indians all the way from the Missouri to the Arkansas, went home well aware that he had made few converts to the farming life—nor would he while the buffalo still roamed.
In March of the next year, though, General Grant ordered the abandonment of Fort C. F. Smith, Fort Reno, and Fort Phil Kearney. The battle for the Bozeman had become a stalemate. General Sherman was as convinced as ever that all the Indians would become, in time, what Chief Justice John Marshall had called them long before: domestic dependent nations. But Sherman also recognized that he could not immediately subdue these Indians by military means. The army’s resources, whether of men or money, were not unlimited; the three little forts were soaking up money while producing nothing but aggravation.
The result of this decision was the famous treaty of 1868. It closed the forts and gave the Sioux and the Cheyennes forever the lands they had fought for so hard: the Dakotas west of the Missouri, the Black Hills, the land between the Platte and the Bighorn Mountains. No whites would be allowed to enter this territory, on penalty of arrest, a stern provision that was violated before the ink was dry on the paper. The Indians agreed to become, in white terms, “civilized” once the buffalo were gone. It is doubtful that many of the Sioux understood some of the more extreme clauses in regard to civilization, such as the provision for compulsory education.
Many dignitaries came to Fort Laramie in August of 1868 for the signing of this treaty, and some Indians came, but Red Cloud didn’t arrive. The whites who sat there, twiddling their thumbs—they included Sherman—got a good taste of Red Cloud’s hauteur. In the end they left the papers and went home. Red Cloud, who had pursued some buffalo he ran into, finally showed up at the fort in November. The hated forts were by then gone, and the Sioux in full possession of their hunting grounds. The whites, for once, had backed down.
Meanwhile, to the south, in the same month that Red Cloud touched the pen, General Custer, in the famous dawn attack that was to provide a visual metaphor for so many movie westerns, wiped out Black Kettle on the Washita.