01Biography
Red Cloud, Maȟpíya Lúta in Lakota, was a leader of the Oglala Lakota, born in present-day Nebraska in the early 1820s. In June 1866 U.S. officials called the Lakota to Fort Laramie to agree to a new road to the Montana gold fields, the Bozeman Trail, which left the Oregon Trail in present-day Wyoming. In the middle of the talks, Army troops arrived on their way to build forts along it. Red Cloud and his followers walked out.
For two years Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors fought the soldiers in the Powder River country, in what became known as Red Cloud's War. In December 1866 they killed Captain William Fetterman and all 80 of his men near Fort Phil Kearny. In 1868 the Army gave up the forts, and Fort Phil Kearny was burned soon after the soldiers left.
02Why they matter
Led the Lakota war that forced the Army to abandon its forts on the Bozeman Trail, a branch road that left the Oregon Trail, in 1868.
03How they died
He signed the new Fort Laramie treaty on November 6, 1868, only after the forts stood empty. He went to Washington, D.C., in 1870 to speak for his people, and in the early 1870s their agency stood beside the old emigrant road on the North Platte, below Fort Laramie. He spent his last years on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and died there on December 10, 1909, aged about 87.
04Legacy
The school the Jesuits opened on Pine Ridge in 1888 at his request was renamed Red Cloud Indian School in 1969, and since 2023 it has used his Lakota name, Maȟpíya Lúta.