Red Cloud

Red Cloud was an Oglala Lakota leader who became one of the most important Indigenous opponents and negotiators confronting United States expansion across the northern Plains. In the 1860s he helped organise resistance to forts and traffic along the Bozeman Trail through Lakota hunting territory.

The conflict known as Red Cloud’s War ended with the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 and the abandonment of several U.S. forts. Red Cloud later lived on the reservation, travelled repeatedly to Washington and pursued diplomacy over land, rations and federal policy while remaining a major Lakota political figure.

Hourly History’s Crazy Horse follows the Oglala Lakota war leader whose resistance became closely associated with Red Cloud’s War and the Great Sioux War. Hourly History’s Red Cloud’s War recounts the conflict of 1866–1868 over the Bozeman Trail and United States forts in the Powder River country. In Michael Punke’s Ridgeline, Wyoming Territory, 1866. Colonel Henry B. Carrington brings the 18th Infantry into the Powder River country to build forts protecting the Bozeman Trail, a route crossing the hunting grounds of the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Northern Arapaho. Red Cloud assembles resistance while Crazy Horse tests the soldiers through raids and decoys; within Fort Phil Kearny, veterans divided by the Civil War struggle with isolation, discipline and competing ideas of command.