Legends of the Old West - RED CLOUD'S WAR Ep. 1 | "The Road to Sand Creek"

Episode Date: February 3, 2019

Red Cloud rises from an obscure child with an alcoholic father to war chief of the Oglala band of the Lakota. As white civilization begins to destroy the Lakota way of life, he calls for war. But older chiefs urge patience. Then the Sand Creek Massacre happens and the march toward war begins. Join Black Barrel+ for early access and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join For more details, visit our website www.blackbarrelmedia.com and check out our social media pages. We’re @OldWestPodcast on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. This episode is brought to you by Lego Fortnite. Lego Fortnite is the ultimate survival crafting game found within Fortnite. It's not just Fortnite Battle Royale with minifigures. It's an entirely new experience that combines the best of Lego play and

Fortnite created to give players of all ages, including kids and families, a safe digital space to play in. Download Fortnite on consoles, PC, cloud services, or Android and play Lego Fortnite for free. Rated ESRB E10+. Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle was in a panic.

He didn't trust the White Army soldiers. No one did. But he also didn't expect this. His people, around 600 of them, were camped near a small stream in southeastern Colorado territory. They had tried to signal to the U.S. Army that they were not hostile by reporting to Fort Lyon, the closest fort in their area, as instructed. But not long after they arrived, the fort's commander ordered them to leave. He said they would be safe here, along the banks of this stream, He said they would be safe here, along the banks of this stream, 35 miles away.

Black Kettle had been told that as long as he flew a white flag and an American flag above his lodge, no harm would come to his people. But now, 700 American soldiers rushed into his camp. The majority of the warriors were away hunting. The people who remained were mostly the elderly and the women and children. Black Kettle gestured wildly at the flags above his lodge, trying to make the soldiers understand. They didn't get it, or they didn't care. They charged into his camp and began killing indiscriminately.

The Cheyennes scattered in all directions, fleeing for their lives. Many rushed to the banks of the frozen stream, called Sand Creek, whose name would be used to mark the event for all time. They made a final stand, but the soldiers just kept coming. As a podcast network, our first priority has always been audio and the stories we're able to share with you. But we also sell merch. And organizing that was made both possible and easy with Shopify. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell and grow at every stage of your business. From the launch your online shop stage all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage.

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and millions of other entrepreneurs of every size across 175 countries. Because businesses that grow, grow with Shopify. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash realm, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash r-e-a-l-m now to grow your business, no matter what stage you're in. shopify.com slash realm. To be continued... This week, Red Cloud rises from an outsider with an alcoholic father to war chief of the Oglala, though not without experiencing tragedy along the way. White civilization begins to destroy the Lakota way of life, and Red Cloud aligns with another respected war chief, Sitting Bull, to advocate all-out war. Other chiefs fear the destructive power of the vast American army, but then a massacre in Colorado Territory happens, and everything changes. And now, here's Episode 1, The Road to Sand Creek.

By the 1500s, the people of the Seven Council Fires had migrated north and settled in the forests of present-day northern Minnesota. They routinely bludgeoned their neighbors to the east, the Algonquin, but they had more trouble with another set of neighbors, the Chippewa. And it was the Chippewa who began calling these new arrivals the Sioux, a word sometimes translated as little snakes, or sometimes referring to a description of a snake. Before long, all the tribes in the area began seeing new types of people, white people, who wore strange clothes and spoke strange languages. They were traitors and trappers from France. To the French, these tribes were equally strange. They existed in a suspended state of stone age technology. They used tools made from stone or animal bones. They had no artistic traditions beyond painting their bodies. They didn't weave baskets or make pottery or farm the land.

They killed what they could with arrows and lances and scrounged plants from the earth. They had no concept of gunpowder and had never heard the explosion of a cannon. They moved around entirely on foot. They had never seen a horse. They used dogs as pack animals to help transport goods from one place to another. This would all change with the arrival of English colonists far to the east and Spanish conquistadors far to the south. The Algonquin tribes were the first neighbors of the Sioux

to acquire the gun through trades with the English. By the time the Algonquin began using guns to fight back against the Sioux in the late 1600s, the pyramids at Giza and the Colosseum in Rome were already ancient. The Great Wall of China had been complete for decades and had been started 300 years earlier. Shakespeare had already written every word he was going to write, and he had now been dead longer than he was alive. Vivaldi, Bach, and Handel would soon establish themselves as masters of music we now call classical, and the Sioux were just learning about weapons beyond the bow and arrow. The Algonquin and the Chippewa began to push the Sioux relentlessly south and west out of the forests and onto the grass prairies of southwestern Minnesota.

The people of the seven council fires had reached a breaking point. The seven tribes had to make a decision. Would they remain in this new land or chart a course farther west on their own? At least three tribes decided to continue west, one of which was the Lakota. The Sioux Nation was forever divided into the Western Sioux and the Eastern Sioux. Tribes decided to continue west, one of which was the Lakota. The Sioux Nation was forever divided into the Western Sioux and the Eastern Sioux. As the Western faction moved toward the Dakotas, they divided themselves into seven bands in keeping with the mystical power of the number seven.

These bands would soon become legends on the high plains. They were the Oglalas, the Bruulés, the Mini-Kanjus, the Hunkpampas, the Sandsarks, the Two Kettles, and the Blackfeet Sioux. By the early 1700s, they had all seen the power of the gun firsthand as they faced the wrath of the Algonquin and the Chippewa, but they still didn't place a high value on the weapon. They would place a high value on something they would begin to acquire in 70 to 80 years. It was an animal with four legs that could run like the wind, and it would change the culture of nearly every tribe west of the Mississippi River.

In 711 AD, Muslim armies, commonly referred to as the Moors, crossed the Strait of Gibraltar from North Africa to Spain and conquered the country. With them came a smaller, faster horse than existed in Europe. This breed had spent hundreds of years evolving and adapting to the dry desert climate of the Middle East and North Africa, and it could run circles around its huge, slow cousins from Northern Europe and Scandinavia. For the next 800 years, Christian armies fought to retake Spanish lands from the African conquerors and their faster horses. In 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella finally defeated the last Muslim kingdom in Spain, Ferdinand and Queen Isabella finally defeated the last Muslim kingdom in Spain,

and that same year, they sponsored the voyage of an Italian explorer named Christopher Columbus. A rapid succession of military voyages followed Columbus, and within 50 years, Spain had conquered the western half of South America and all of Central America. After the Spanish established themselves in what is now Mexico, they moved north into a sparsely populated land that stretched from a river that would be called the Mississippi all the way to the Pacific Ocean. With them, they brought the horse. They established missions and forts in present-day Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. They brutally subjugated the natives they found in these lands, forcing them into slavery and converting them to Christianity.

In 1680, after a hundred years of suffering under the Spanish, a tribe in New Mexico called the Pueblos rose up in one historic revolt. They slaughtered every Spaniard they could find. They destroyed buildings and tore down the symbols of the Christian god they had been forced to worship. And they threw open the gates of the Spanish corrals and let loose thousands of horses onto the southern plains. It became known as the Great Horse Dispersal. The North American Mustang was born, and the culture of the American West was changed forever. The Apaches found them first, and then the Kiowa and the Comanche, and then the Shoshone and the Cheyenne, and the Cheyenne began to trade them to the Sioux. The Sioux began integrating the horse into their society in the 1770s and 1780s.

began integrating the horse into their society in the 1770s and 1780s. At the same time, citizens of 13 colonies in the East were fighting a war for independence against the British. The Sioux knew almost nothing of these people or their war. None of it meant anything to them at the time. But that would change in less than 30 years. A brave of the Brulee band of the Lakota named Lone Man gazed up at the night sky, mesmerized by what he saw. Most, if not all, of the people gazed up at the sky with him. It was early May, 1821, and they were camped along Blue Water Creek in present-day western Nebraska.

On this night, they were transfixed by a meteor shower. Streamers of fire trailed across the sky. A few days later, Lone Man's wife, Wox as she thinks, gave birth to his first son. Lone Man named him Red Cloud to appease the Great Spirit after the brilliant meteor shower. All the headmen of the band agreed this was a wise choice. But Lone Man made very few wise choices after that. Just four years later, in 1825, he died of alcoholism. His wife was forced to take her three children back to her own band of people, the Oglala,

where her close relative, Old Smoke, was the headman. Old Smoke and his brother Whitehawk became father figures to young Red Cloud. They taught the boy everything, and he absorbed all the wisdom and tradition like a sponge. While Red Cloud grew and learned the ways of his people, the western Lakota were already being pestered by the whites from the east to sign treaties. In 1825, the year Red Cloud's father died, the U.S. wanted the Hunkpapa's band of the Lakota to sign a trade agreement. Even at this early stage of the history of the U.S.,

the western tribes had heard of the double standards applied to these treaties, and they didn't really take them seriously. Even if they wanted to, it would have been virtually impossible for them to understand the language of the agreement, a fact that was surely not lost on the whites. Here's the introduction to that 1825 treaty. I'm going to try to do this in one breath. This is one sentence with 16 commas. For the purpose of perpetuating the friendship which has heretofore existed, as also to remove all future cause of discussion and dissension,

as it respects trade and friendship with the United States and their citizens, and the Hunkpapas Band of the Sioux Tribe of Indians, the President of the United States, by Atkinson, of the United States Army, and Major Benjamin O'Fallon, Indian agent, with full powers and authority, specially appointed for that purpose, of the one part, and the undersigned chiefs, headmen, and warriors of the said Hunkpapas band of the Sioux Indians, on behalf of their band, of the other part. As with most treaties, the assembled Hunkpapas shrugged and said, sure, okay, and accepted their gifts. Then they went on their way as if nothing had happened. They knew the treaty was not much more than just words on a page, and there was no way they could fully understand those words and complicated phrases

anyway, so the whole process was not much more than just a gift-giving ceremony. In the Oglala camps, Red Cloud grew up fast. He learned all the essentials of becoming a warrior, and chief among them were shooting and riding. A Lakota warrior could fire half a dozen arrows in the time it took a white soldier to reload his musket. It was said that the best warriors could fire ten arrows so fast, all ten would be in the air at the same time. The U.S. Army would learn of these skills firsthand in about 30 years when Red Cloud unleashed his warriors,

including his top field commander, Crazy Horse. But for now, Red Cloud was still learning their use. He was learning how to train his pony to hunt buffalo. Before the horse, the Lakota hunted buffalo on foot and it was exceedingly difficult and dangerous. A group of warriors would have to crawl toward the herd on their stomachs. They were draped in wolf skins and tried to single out an individual animal. They would fire a volley of arrows into it to bring the animal down. Or, if possible, they would stampede a herd over a cliff.

But with the horse, a single warrior could bring down numerous animals. And now, the hunt became a matter of pride and prestige, as well as the most important process to sustain the tribe with food, clothing, and tools. Warriors now marked their arrows so everyone could see how many animals they killed and of what size. But to train a horse to run alongside a stampeding herd of buffalo was a long process. From birth, the horse was smeared with buffalo fat and draped with buffalo robes so it would get used to the scent of the animal. A sort of bridle was made from buffalo hair and used to train the horse. Warriors would ride their hunting ponies at full gallop in and out of the tribe's horse herd to

get the animal used to the chaos of the hunt. And warriors had one pony that was used exclusively for hunting. Red Cloud learned all of these essential tools of life, and many more from his uncles Old Smoke and White Hawk. But even more important than these skills, he learned the mythology that would drive his actions and would be the heart of his war against the army. He learned of a central figure in Lakota lore, Iktomi the Trickster. One day, Iktomi was out walking around, admiring the magnificent landscape around him, when he came across a hole in the ground. The hole seemed to be breathing. Air rushed in and out like a living thing, inhales and exhales. He looked into the hole and saw creatures living inside. He told them to come up here and see the beautiful world he was looking at. Why would they want to live down in that hole?

Eventually, one of them climbed out of the hole, looked at the world, and went back down and told the others how wonderful it was. But the others were still hesitant. Finally, an elder decided to go up and be the first to live in the new world. The elder climbed out of the hole and then changed into Buffalo Nation, or as we call them today, the Lakota, and the people spread across the plains. The hole where the people had been living is called Wind Cave and it still exists today with its unusual phenomenon of air rushing in and out as if it's breathing. Wind Cave is in the Black

Hills and it's why the Lakota call the Black Hills the heart of everything that is and why Red Cloud and thousands of others fought for 30 years to keep whites out of the area. Red Cloud grew up fast, both physically and figuratively. He became a warrior and commander that any modern general would be desperate to have. He filled out to six feet tall and was well built. He was ruthless, relentless, and fearless. And in his youth, he was arrogant. He took his first scalp at 16 years old during a raid on the Pawnee, whom the Lakota nearly decimated after years of war. The Pawnee would become scouts for the U.S. Army in later years as a way to get

revenge. When his uncle Whitehawk was killed, Red Cloud took over leadership of the Man's Warrior Society within the Oglala. In his early 20s, Red Cloud killed a rival of another band. His Oglala were the largest and most powerful band of the Seven in the Lakota tribe, and this action now made Red Cloud the de facto war chief of the Oglala and of all the Western Sioux. war chief of the Oglala and of all the Western Sioux. There were still older men who were technically in charge, men like his uncle Old Smoke, but they were mostly peacetime chiefs. In times of war, the people turned to Red Cloud. But his rise to power was not without obstacles or devastating tragedy. or devastating tragedy.

A Lakota man could marry as many wives as he could afford. When two people were in love, the custom at the time was for the groom to offer gifts to the father of the potential bride in exchange for her hand in marriage. As Red Cloud grew into his twenties, he fell in love with two women, Pineleaf and Pretty Owl. He was more attracted to Pineleaf. She was essentially his first love.

But a problem dogged his early years. He was a respected warrior, but he was also ambitious, and his paternal lineage was standing in the way of rising further within the tribe. Even though he had been raised by prominent members of his mother's people, the Oglala, he was still a Brulé by birth. Brulé is a French name which roughly translates to burnt. Red Cloud's father had died a humiliating death from the white man's liquor, which the Lakota called the water that makes men crazy. man's liquor, which the Lakota called the water that makes men crazy. This humiliation was blocking his ascension, no matter how great a warrior he was. So while he desperately wanted to marry Pineleaf, she came from a more common family. Pretty Owl was from a more prominent family, and it would be a better political move to marry her first. Although a Lakota man could marry multiple women,

the first was always granted a place of greater status. Despite his love for Pineleaf, he forced himself to marry Pretty Owl first. The people rejoiced at the prospect of a long-awaited marriage. Everyone except Pineleaf. After Pretty Owl's father accepted Red Cloud's gifts, two days of feasting and celebrating followed. But throughout the joyous occasion, Red Cloud was restless. The marriage ceremony would take place at the end of the second day, and he tried to find a chance to talk privately with Pineleaf and tell her he still loved her and he wanted to make her his second wife.

But in the midst of the celebration, the opportunity never presented itself. At the end of the second day, Red Cloud and Pretty Owl were married and retired to their honeymoon lodge. The next morning, Red Cloud stepped out at dawn to go gather his horses from the surrounding hills. As he passed a single tree near his lodge, he froze in his tracks. Pine Leaf's body hung from a rope tied to a branch. She had hanged herself sometime in the night. It took a long time for Red Cloud and the Oglala to recover from Pine Leaf's suicide, but the cold reality of the situation was that

they were forced to move on to deal with an issue that was beginning to threaten all the tribes west of the Missouri River, the white man. What had begun as a trickle of mountain men in the 1820s and 1830s had turned into a flood by the 1840s. Whites from the east moved through Lakota lands at an incredible rate in the late 1840s. By 1848, the United States claimed all the land from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and from Canada to Mexico, lands the tribes of every description had lived on for hundreds of years. In just 45 years, the U.S. had used treaties and wars that the tribes in the West knew very little about, if anything, to add all this land to its growing nation, and the westward expansion,

dubbed Manifest Destiny, began. Mormons moved through Lakota lands in 1847 and 1848 to settle near the Great Salt Lake in modern-day Utah. John Sutter found gold in a stream near his sawmill in 1848, and the next year, a torrent of whites hurried to California with dreams of golden riches in their heads. Between 1849 and 1851, more than 20,000 wagons rolled through native lands, and the deep ruts created by their wheels are still visible in some places today. The estimated 50,000 travelers used two main roads, the Oregon Trail to

the north and the Santa Fe Trail to the south. The trails became stinking lanes littered with discarded goods of every kind. Animal carcasses were strewn along the grass. Travelers who died were buried in shallow graves, which were often dug up by wolves. The smell from the rotting corpses defiled the air. Whites from the East had no concept of the vastness of the West and were not prepared for the miles and miles of grass with no water or shade. Some of them carried pianos or grandfather clocks in their wagons and those things were eventually thrown out and left to rot. Whites fouled the streams with their waste and cluttered the land with their

garbage and spread disease to people who had no immunities or medicines for treatment. In 1849, the U.S. bought a small weigh station from a French trader in eastern Wyoming territory called Fort John. It had been constructed 15 years earlier by two mountain men as a trading post, and then sold and expanded over the years. The army wanted to reorganize and expand it, and send soldiers to guard it as the western hub for travelers. They called it Fort Laramie, and two years later, it became the site of the largest gathering of tribes in history,

and the first major attempt at treaty talks with the tribes of the Northern Plains. It was a grand show and set the stage for 25 years of bloodshed. In the 1840s and early 1850s, as white people rushed west across the lands of the Lakota and Cheyenne in search of gold, the tribes killed them on the trails. New travelers saw the bones of the dead on the prairie as they passed. And it was not just because the travelers were driving across the best hunting grounds. The whites were starting to pose a real danger to Lakota way of life. They were killing the buffalo simply for the animal's hide.

They stripped the fur and maybe took a little meat for themselves, but they left the rest to be picked over by scavengers. Not only was this an intolerable waste of the primary resource of the Lakota, but it was an unconscionable insult to the animal spirit. The livelihood of the Lakota was tied to the buffalo. If you were going to kill the animal, you had better make its death mean something. The death better help bring life to others. To kill it only for its tongue and its skin was blasphemy.

So the Lakota and the Cheyenne and others killed the people who committed these crimes. By 1851, the U.S. government knew it needed to do something about the killing. It wouldn't, and couldn't, stop its citizens from going west, so a treaty was needed. That fall, it called a great council at Fort Laramie to discuss a deal. 10,000 natives gathered at the fort in early September. Among them were three men who would soon become legends, Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, and Crazy Horse. Red Cloud was 30 years old and a recognized leader of his people. Sitting Bull was a rising star at 20 years old.

Crazy Horse was just 11, but it wouldn't take long for him to earn nearly unprecedented accolades. The Indian agent, a man named Thomas Fitzpatrick, acknowledged that the whites were killing the buffalo and destroying the prairie. The U.S. was prepared to pay $50,000 per year to compensate the tribes for the passage of white travelers and the establishment of small forts to help the wagon trains. In return, the tribes should outline the boundaries of their land and elect one person to negotiate with the government of the Great Father in the East. to negotiate with the government of the Great Father in the East. As before, the leaders of the tribes basically shrugged and said,

sure, whatever, and waited for their promised gifts to arrive. The things the whites wanted were so patently absurd, they couldn't possibly be taken seriously. Whites completely misunderstood two fundamental aspects of the tribes, ownership and leadership. The tribes couldn't create boundaries for their land because the land wasn't theirs. They didn't own it. They couldn't own it. No one could. You couldn't own the soil and the grass and the trees and the streams any more than you could own the wind that blew across it. You could hunt on it and occupy it while you were there, but that was it. You could hunt on it and occupy it while you were there,

but that was it. You didn't build permanent structures on it and you didn't tear it up to plant things. The most you could do was claim the best hunting grounds and then manage them as long as you could, which meant you held them as long as you could fight for them. If another tribe was stronger, it would push you off the land. That was the entire history of the people of the plains. And if the idea of setting tribal boundaries was ridiculous, the idea of one person speaking for everyone was downright insane. That was flat out impossible. A chief or a headman was considered a leader of his people, and his words carried weight.

But he couldn't order a warrior to do something, especially not a warrior from another band or another tribe. And even if the tribes could somehow instantly reverse hundreds of years of tradition, they knew the whites would never live up to their end of the deal. So the whole thing was basically just a thinly veiled sham, and the tribes gave it exactly that much weight. The head men who touched the pen, as the signing process was called,

did so more as a formality than out of an earnest belief in the agreement. Touching the pen was a literal description of the procedure. None of the chiefs could write, so they would walk up to a table one by one And touch the top of a pen that was held by a secretary That signaled their willingness to sign the treaty And then the secretary wrote the name of the man on the document At the end of the long ceremony The tribes left Fort Laramie and went on their fall buffalo hunt.

And as far as we know, things were relatively quiet for about two years. In 1853, violence flared up between soldiers in a band of Lakota called the Mini-Kanju near Fort Laramie, with killing on both sides. The next year, it happened again. Thirty white soldiers fired on a camp while they were outnumbered 40 to 1, and the combined forces of Oglala, Brulé, and Mini-Kanju killed them all. This was likely the first time Red Cloud killed a white man. The next summer, the many conjoos in the brulees, under a leader named Spotted Tail, attacked numerous wagon trains, killing and burning and mutilating corpses. At the same time in the Oglala camps, Red Cloud was being given another great honor.

He was elevated to chieftain status. This didn't mean he was a chief, but he was now part of an elite group who were eligible to be chief someday. The army also made changes that summer. It placed Colonel William Harney in command of the area around Fort Laramie. The Lakota called him Mad Bear, and it was a good title. He hated Indians, and he had been kicked out of the army once already, but brought back because his former neighbor was now President James K. Polk. Harney and his new hand-picked Indian agent ordered all the bands in the area to move into Fort Laramie. But when one stayed behind to keep hunting, Harney rode out with 600 soldiers to find it. When he did, he killed 86 people and butchered their bodies. He took another

70 prisoner in what was called afterward the Battle of Ash Creek. But it wasn't a battle. It was just a slaughter. And a pattern was taking shape in the press after such engagements. When whites killed Indians, it was called a battle. When Indians killed whites, it was called a massacre. The following spring, Harney effectively ended the treaty that had been signed at Fort Laramie five years earlier. He told the tribes to stay away from the Oregon Trail, which was fertile hunting grounds, and that he was taking the western half of North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska for the United States. This land, of course, included the sacred Black

Hills. That fall, Lakota messengers traveled to all the bands of the Western Sioux. Their message was threefold. Enjoy your peaceful winter camps, have a good buffalo hunt in the spring, and then prepare to meet for a grand council. It was time to unite against the whites. Three-quarters of the Western Sioux gathered along the Belfouche River near Bear Butte in what is today South Dakota. It was August 1857, and the Grand Council assembled to decide how to handle the Blue Coat soldiers and the White Travelers. Two prominent voices argued for immediate raids. They belonged to Red Cloud and Sitting Bull. The two men were not friends.

They were not cordial, but they were on the same side of this issue, and they proposed the same action. But some older chiefs urged caution. They advised a wait-and-see approach. Don't kick the hornet's nest, they said. Crazy Horse was a young brave at this time, just 16 years old. But he had already proved himself to be fearless on raids. He was an exceedingly quiet young man.

He rarely spoke, so when he did, people listened. He had been born into the Brulee band of the Lakota tribe of the Western Sioux, but he was something of a nomad. He roamed freely across the plains and stayed with and raided with different bands. Now, he repeated a story he had heard on his travels. He had learned from a Cheyenne warrior that some blue-coat soldiers now carried small guns, much smaller than rifles, that could be strapped to their hips and fired many times without reloading. This was definitely something to consider at the council.

In the end, they chose something close to the wait-and-see approach. In the end, they chose something close to the wait-and-see approach. As before, no man could tell another what to do, so if a war party wanted to raid the whites, they could do it. But in general, they would not coordinate large-scale raids. Two things were agreed upon by everyone. The Black Hills must be protected at all costs, and each band was to defend its chosen hunting ground to the death. The 1860 census said there were roughly 31 million people in the United

States, and 90% of them lived east of the Mississippi River. That percentage was about to shift dramatically. Gold had been discovered near Cherry Creek in Colorado Territory on the lands of the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho. A boomtown sprang up called Denver, and six years later, it would be the launch pad for the massacre that would become the tipping point for Red Cloud. Silver had been discovered in the mountains of Nevada, the famous Comstock Lode, and gold had been found in Montana. Fortune seekers streamed west. By 1860, the Oregon Trail was so safe that a system to carry the mail from the Midwest to California had been established. Riders of the Pony Express delivered mail from

St. Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento, California in just 10 days in good weather, 14 in bad weather. And then in 1861, war broke out in the east between the Union and the Confederacy. Almost overnight, troops in the west were reduced to a skeleton crew. Almost overnight, troops in the West were reduced to a skeleton crew. In the summer of 1862, the Lakota in Minnesota rose up and killed numerous whites, but their uprising was quickly crushed by the Army. The largest mass execution in American history followed. Thirty-eight Lakota men were hanged at the same time. Six months later, on January 1, 1863, the Homestead Act took effect.

It offered 160 acres of land that had been surveyed by the government to anyone who could live on it for five years and make improvements. It didn't work as smoothly as the government had envisioned, but it still lured 300,000 people to the west. While all this was happening, Red Cloud and his Oglalas smashed into their hated enemies the Crows and pushed them out of the area known as the Powder River Country. The land became his most cherished hunting grounds, and it encompassed the northeastern corner of present-day Wyoming and the southeastern corner of present-day Montana. He was far to the north of the Oregon Trail and lived relatively free of white interference. He was here when refugees from Colorado territory

straggled into his camps begging for help. They had a terrible story to tell. begging for help. They had a terrible story to tell. The back-and-forth fighting in the area around Denver had ramped up in the spring of 1864. A U.S. Army volunteer unit had attacked four Cheyenne villages. In response, Cheyenne, Lakota, and Arapaho warriors had wreaked havoc on any whites they could find. They terrorized ranches. They destroyed way stations. They killed travelers. They did so much damage that the road from Fort Leavenworth to Denver was temporarily closed. Then soldiers attacked a Cheyenne village and killed a chief named Lean Bear.

When he died, Lean Bear was wearing a medal that had been given to him by President Abraham Lincoln. The medal signified peace. Three weeks later, warriors brutally killed the Hungate family on its ranch 25 miles southeast of Denver. A group of white men brought the bodies of the family members into the city and displayed them so the citizens could see the atrocities for themselves. As you'd expect, the people of Denver were in an uproar. Territorial Governor John Evans organized a regiment of volunteer cavalry for an enlistment of 100 days. Its sole purpose was to pursue, kill, and destroy all hostile Indians that infest the plains. Colonel John Milton Chivington was given command. He was 6'5 and 260 pounds, with a thick black beard and a booming voice, and he hated Indians with a

religious fervor. But before he could make much progress with his mission, the commander of a fort southeast of Denver brought many chiefs of the Cheyenne and Arapaho to the bargaining table. Major Edward Wynkoop, who has a street named after him in downtown Denver today, reached a tentative agreement with Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle and others. He then escorted the tribal leaders to a meeting with Governor Evans and Colonel Chivington. The governor told the chiefs that they are now at war with the United States, and they must make a deal with the army representative, Colonel Chivington. Chivington told the men they must surrender themselves to Major Wynkoop at Fort Lyon if they desired peace

And of course, the implication is that if you're not at Fort Lyon, you're considered hostile Roughly 750 Cheyenne and Arapaho began arriving in the area around Fort Lyon In the meantime, a new commander had arrived at the fort. Major Wynkoop stayed at the fort for another couple weeks to brief the new commander on the agreement, and then the new commander told the chiefs they should lead their people back to their usual camps while he waited for further instructions. While the two commanders worked with the tribal leaders at Fort Lyon, Colonel Chivington quietly moved his volunteer cavalry toward the outpost. On November 26, 1864, Major Wynkoop left Fort Lyon for his new assignment in Kansas.

Two days later, Colonel Chivington arrived. He surrounded the fort with guards so no one could get in or out. Chivington arrived. He surrounded the fort with guards so no one could get in or out. At dawn on November 29th, he led 750 troopers toward the Cheyenne and Arapaho camps along the banks of Sand Creek. That morning, most of the warriors were out hunting. Chivington gave the order to charge, and his untrained soldiers swooped down on the village. to charge, and his untrained soldiers swooped down on the village. All semblance of military order was gone in seconds. The soldiers killed anyone they found. Black Kettle rushed out of his lodge. He had been told that as long as he flew a white flag and an American flag above his lodge, his people would be safe. He had done everything that had been asked of him during the peace process. Now his people

were being slaughtered. A fellow chief, White Antelope, who had been prominent in the peace talks, was shot in the throat. Old men, women, and children rushed toward Sand Creek to find shelter. The few braves who were still in camp tried to protect them. For two hours, Chivington's men picked them off one by one. Those who were lucky enough to escape, including Black Kettle, hurried across the frozen ground toward the hunting camp of the warriors many miles away. Chivington's unit spent the rest of the day killing the wounded and mutilating the bodies of the dead. The cavalry finally departed Sand Creek at dusk. More than 230 Cheyenne and Arapaho lay dead, roughly 150 of whom were women, children,

and the elderly. When the refugees finally finished the story of the Sand Creek Massacre, Red Cloud and all those who heard it were filled with rage. Eight years earlier, he had pushed for immediate raids against the whites, but they had been put off. Now, Red Cloud was done waiting. Red Cloud's war. That's next time on the Legends of the Old West podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please give it a rating and a review on iTunes or wherever you're listening.

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