Fort Laramie 1851 and the Indian Wars 1862-1867
A Treaty That Looked Like Peace
By 1851 the United States was running into a problem on the central Plains. Pioneer wagon trains rolling along the Oregon and California Trails were stripping the Platte River valley of grass and game and bringing cholera into Native camps. Plains nations — especially the Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho — were responding with raids on the wagon trains. Washington wanted the trails open. The Plains nations wanted compensation and recognised territories. In September 1851, around 10,000 people from the Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, Shoshone, Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara nations gathered at Horse Creek, near Fort Laramie in modern Wyoming, to negotiate.
The Fort Laramie Treaty assigned each nation a defined territory. The Lakota got land between the North Platte and the Missouri; the Cheyenne and Arapaho got the central Plains around the upper Arkansas; the Crow got the Yellowstone country. In return, the United States promised an annuity of $50,000 a year in goods for fifty years and a guarantee that wagon trains would not interfere with hunting. Both sides regarded the meeting as the largest peace conference yet held on the Plains.
The 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty assigned defined territories to the Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, Shoshone and other Plains nations, in return for $50,000 a year in goods (later cut to ten years by the US Senate) and safe passage of wagon trains on the Oregon and California Trails.
Why Concentration Failed
Within a few years the treaty was unravelling. Four pressures explain why. First, the Senate quietly cut the annuity term from fifty years to ten without renegotiating with the signatories — a unilateral change Plains nations regarded as a broken promise. Second, no Plains nation was a single political body, so chiefs who had signed could not bind every band. Third, settler pressure on the Plains kept growing: the 1859 Pike’s Peak gold rush in Colorado triggered a flood of miners through the heart of Cheyenne and Arapaho land. Fourth, US officials decided to push the line further: the 1861 Treaty of Fort Wise stripped most of the central Plains land back from the Cheyenne and Arapaho, leaving them a small strip in south-eastern Colorado.
The Indian Wars Open: Dakota 1862
The cycle of war that defines this part of the unit began not on the Plains but in Minnesota. By summer 1862 annuity payments to the Dakota Sioux were months late, the harvest had failed, and a trader called Andrew Myrick had reportedly told a starving delegation, “Let them eat grass.” In August 1862 four young Dakota men killed five white settlers; their chief, Little Crow, reluctantly led a wider uprising in which roughly 600 settlers were killed. The army crushed the revolt within weeks. President Lincoln reviewed the resulting trials and sentenced 38 Dakota men to be hanged at Mankato on 26 December 1862 — the largest single-day mass execution in US history. The Dakota War showed that broken treaties plus settler pressure could quickly produce open war on the central Plains.
In autumn 1864 the Cheyenne peace chief Black Kettle had brought his band to camp near Sand Creek in eastern Colorado, flying a US flag and a white flag of truce after promises of safety from the local commander. At dawn on 29 November 1864 a force of around 700 Colorado militia under Colonel John Chivington attacked the camp. Around 150 Cheyenne and Arapaho were killed, the great majority women, children and the elderly; survivors testified that bodies were mutilated and trophies displayed in Denver theatres. Chivington called it a victory; a US Congressional inquiry said Chivington had “deliberately planned and executed a foul and dastardly massacre which would have disgraced the veriest savage among those who were the victims of his cruelty”. Sand Creek became the moment hopes of peaceful concentration died on the central Plains.
Fetterman’s Trap and Red Cloud’s War
In the north a second crisis was unfolding. The Bozeman Trail, opened in 1863, crossed straight through Lakota hunting grounds in modern Wyoming on its way to the Montana goldfields. The Lakota war leader Red Cloud warned that any new fort on the trail meant war. The army built three forts anyway. On 21 December 1866, near Fort Phil Kearny, a small detachment under Captain William Fetterman pursued a Lakota decoy party led by Crazy Horse over a ridge; behind the ridge waited 1,500–2,000 Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors. All 81 men in Fetterman’s detachment were killed in less than an hour. Fetterman’s Trap was the worst US Army defeat on the Plains until Little Bighorn ten years later.
Two years of stalemate followed. Red Cloud’s warriors kept the forts under siege; the army could not safely use the trail. In 1868, in the second Fort Laramie Treaty, the United States agreed to abandon the three forts, close the Bozeman Trail, and recognise a Great Sioux Reservation including the sacred Black Hills of Dakota. Red Cloud’s War is the only war in US history that ended with a Native nation forcing the United States to give up land it had claimed.
Three consequences mattered for the rest of the period. First, trust between Plains nations and the federal government collapsed; even peace chiefs like Black Kettle (later killed at Washita in 1868) became symbols of broken promises. Second, the army on the Plains grew sharply: by 1869 it had 25,000 men permanently west of the Mississippi. Third, eastern public opinion split — the Sand Creek Congressional inquiry shocked many in the East, while frontier newspapers cheered Chivington. The 1868 Treaty looked like a Lakota victory but it locked Plains nations onto reservations whose boundaries would soon be redrawn.
Sand Creek (29 November 1864) destroyed Cheyenne trust in negotiation and prompted a Congressional inquiry. Fetterman’s Trap (21 December 1866) was the worst US Army defeat on the Plains until 1876 and forced the United States to abandon the Bozeman Trail forts in the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty.