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Red Cloud Makhpiya Luta
(1822-1909) OGLALA - LAKOTA
Oglala;
(pronounced Og-la-la
sometimes pronounced Og-a-la-la meaning Scatters Their Own.)
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They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never
kept but one; they promised to take our land, and they took it.
Red
Cloud
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As a warrior and a statesman, Red Cloud's success in
confrontations with the United States government marked him as one of the most
important Lakota leaders of the nineteenth century.
Although the
details of his early life are unclear, Red Cloud was born near the forks of the
Platte River, near what is now North Platte, Nebraska. His mother was an Oglala
and his father, who died in Red Cloud's youth, was a Brulé. Red Cloud was raised
by his maternal uncle, Chief Smoke.
This colour
photographic of Red Cloud was taken in 1902
Much of Red
Cloud's early life was spent at war, first and most often against the
neighbouring Pawnee and Crow, at times against other Oglala. In 1841 he killed
one of his uncle's primary rivals, an event which divided the Oglala for the
next fifty years. He gained enormous prominence within the Lakota nation for his
leadership in territorial wars against the Pawnees, Crows, Utes and Shoshones.
Red Clouds people,
taken at Fort Robinson, Nebraska between 1874 -1880
In an 1851 treaty at Fort Laramie, the Sioux (among other
tribes) had agreed on terms by which the United States might
establish limited roads and military posts on Indian land.
[1]By
1865, Red Cloud was one of many Indian leaders who believed the
U.S. was breaking the treaty by establishing forts too far up
the
Bozeman Trail. They had seen other tribes
expelled from their land and were determined to resist.
In June 1865 Red Cloud's Sioux joined a coalition led by Woqini
(Roman
Nose) of the
Cheyenne, to attack a military post on the
North Platte River. Believing they had taught the bluecoats to
respect the treaty, they returned home only to learn in August
of further encroachments. The
U.S.
Army was constructing forts along the Bozeman
Trail straight through
Lakota
territory (modern-day Wyoming), from the
South
Platte River in
Colorado to Montana's
gold
country. Red Cloud foresaw the expulsion of the Lakota from
their land.
Beginning in
1866,
Red Cloud orchestrated the most successful war against the United States ever
fought by an Indian nation. The army had begun to construct forts along the
Bozeman Trail, which ran through the heart of Lakota territory in present-day
Wyoming to the Montana gold fields from Colorado's South Platte River. As
caravans of miners and settlers began to cross the Lakota's land, Red Cloud was
haunted by the vision of Minnesota's expulsion of the Eastern Lakota in 1862 and
1863. So he launched a series of assaults on the forts, most notably the
crushing defeat of Lieutenant Colonel William Fetterman's column of eighty men
just outside
Fort Phil Kearny,
Wyoming, in December of 1866. The garrisons were kept in a
state of exhausting fear of further attacks through the rest of the winter.
The Fettermen
engagement was known to the Lakota as 'The Battle of a Hundred Slain' which took
place in the Powder River region of Wyoming in 1866. Because there were no
survivors the whites called it the Fetterman Massacre.
Red Cloud's
strategies were so successful that by
1868
the United States government had agreed to the
Fort Laramie Treaty.
The treaty's remarkable provisions mandated that the United States abandon its
forts along the Bozeman Trail and guarantee the Lakota their possession of what
is now the Western half of South Dakota, including the Black Hills, along with
much of Montana and Wyoming.
Uneasy relations between the expanding United States and the
Indians continued. In 1871, Red Cloud visited Washington D.C.,
and met with Commissioner of Indian Affairs
Ely S.
Parker and President
Ulysses Grant. In 1871, the
Red
Cloud Agency was established on the Platte
River, downstream from Fort Laramie. As outlined in the Treaty
of 1868, the agency staff was responsible for issuing rations to
the Lakota weekly as well as providing the annual annuity goods.
In the fall of 1873, the agency was removed to the upper White
River in northwestern Nebraska.
The peace, of
course, did not last.
Custer's
1874
Black Hills expedition again brought war to the northern Plains, a war that
would mean the end of independent Indian nations. For reasons which are not
entirely clear, Red Cloud did not join
Crazy Horse,
Sitting Bull
and other war leaders in the Lakota War of 1876-77. However, after the military
defeat of the Lakota nation, Red Cloud continued to fight for the needs and
autonomy of his people, even if in less obvious or dramatic ways than waging
war.
Father and Son, Red
Cloud (seated) and Jack Red Cloud, both taken sometime in the early 1900, Jack
Red Cloud right.
Throughout the
1880's Red Cloud struggled with Pine Ridge Indian Agent Valentine McGillycuddy
over the distribution of government food and supplies and the control of the
Indian police force. He was eventually successful in securing McGillycuddy's
dismissal. Red Cloud cultivated contacts with sympathetic Eastern reformers,
especially Thomas A. Bland, and was not above pretending for political effect to
be more acculturated to white ways than he actually was.
Red Cloud, William
Frederick Cody (Buffalo Bill) and American Horse both photographs were taken at
Madison Square Gardens New York for the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show between 1897
-1898
Fearing the
Army's presence on his reservation, Red Cloud refrained from endorsing the Ghost
Dance movement, and unlike Sitting Bull and
Big Foot,
he escaped the Army's occupation unscathed. Thereafter he continued to fight to
preserve the authority of chiefs such as himself, opposed leasing Lakota lands
to whites, and vainly fought allotment of Indian reservations into individual
tracts under the
1887
Dawes Act.
The two images of Red Cloud, as the whites wanted him, and who he
really was.
In 1889 he opposed a treaty to sell more of the Sioux land; his
steadfastness and that of
Sitting Bull required the government agents to
obtain the necessary signatures through subterfuges such as
obtaining the signatures of children. He negotiated strongly
with
Indian
agents such as
Dr.
Valentine McGillycuddy, and opposed the
Dawes
Act.
Red Cloud became an important leader of the Lakota as they
transitioned from the freedom of the plains to the confinement
of the reservation system. He outlived the other major Sioux
leaders of the Indian wars and died in 1909, but his long and
complex life endures as testimony to the variety of ways in
which Indians resisted their conquest. He was never part of the
Ghost
Dance movement.
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