Powder River: Red Cloud's War and the Fight for the Bighorn Country

In June 1863, John Bozeman knelt to drink at a ford on the North Platte while John Jacobs studied the country to the north: grass, cottonwood bottoms, blue bluffs, and not a single wagon track. The new gold camps at Virginia City lay beyond it, and the two men meant to cut a road to them through the valleys of the Powder and the Tongue and across the Bighorn, saving travelers hundreds of miles. The road would also run through the best buffalo range south of the Yellowstone, the hunting ground of the Lakota, the Northern Cheyenne and the Arapaho.

The Lakota understood before anyone at Fort Laramie that the fight would be over the ground, not the road. When government commissioners came to Fort Laramie in 1866 to ask for the trail, Red Cloud walked out, and Colonel Henry Carrington's infantry marched up it anyway to hold it with a chain of forts.

Two years of war followed: raids on the wood trains cutting timber for Fort Phil Kearny, the ambush north of the fort in December 1866 that killed Captain William Fetterman and all eighty men with him, and the desperate defenses of August 1867, when soldiers held off attacks from a hayfield corral and a ring of wagon boxes.

In 1868 the government gave up. The Army abandoned its forts, warriors burned them, and Red Cloud signed a treaty that closed the Powder River country to settlers as unceded Indian territory and set the Black Hills inside a great reservation. The United States had lost a war. The peace it signed lasted less than a decade, and the book carries its promises into the years that broke them.