The United States army had built forts in response to attacks on civilian travelers, using a treaty right to "establish roads, military and other post".

[5] Red Cloud's War consisted mostly of constant small-scale Indian raids and attacks on the soldiers and civilians at the three forts in the Powder River country, wearing down those garrisons.

The largest action of the war, the Fetterman Fight (with 81 men killed on the U.S. side), was the worst military defeat suffered by the U.S. on the Great Plains until the Battle of the Little Bighorn in the Crow Indian reservation ten years later.

[9] The victory of the Lakota and their allies endured for eight years until the Great Sioux War of 1876, when the US resumed taking their territories, including the sacred Black Hills.

As early as 1805, a Crow camp allowed French-Canadian fur trader François Antoine Larocque to follow it across parts of the Powder River area.

The treaty was signed by representatives of some factions of the numerous tribes of the Plains and mountainous West, including Crow, Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho; Gros Ventre, Mandan, and Arikara; Assiniboine and other nations.

[17] They crossed Powder River (the dividing line between the Lakota territory and that of the Crow) and launched their "own program for expansions" westward at the expense of other Natives.

[22] However, the Lakotas "had gradually driven the Crows back upon the headwaters of the Yellowstone", and now they claimed "as a conquest almost the entire country traversed by what is called the Powder River route [Bozeman Trail] ...".

[24]The treaty breaking annexation of the Crow's Powder River area in the 1850s by the Lakotas was the basis for Red Cloud's War against the United States on exactly the same soil a decade later.

No white man could be found to undertake a dangerous mission to find Red Cloud and bring him to Fort Laramie for negotiations, so several of the "loafers" took the task.

On June 13, however, with the worst possible timing, Colonel Henry B. Carrington commanding the 18th Infantry, arrived at Laramie with the two battalions of the regiment (approximately 1,300 men in 16 companies) and construction supplies.

In December, President Andrew Johnson in his State of the Union address said that the Indians had "unconditionally submitted to our authority and manifested an earnest desire for a renewal of friendly relations."

The United States, as signer of the 1851 Fort Laramie treaty, could only undertake meaningful negotiations about the western Powder River plains with the legitimate holder of the area, the Crow tribe.

Carrington's opponents, the migratory hunting and warrior societies of the Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho, had advantages in mobility, horsemanship, knowledge of the country, guerrilla hit-and-run tactics, and the capability to concentrate their forces to achieve numerical superiority.

Given the typically early and severe winters of the high plains, the middle of August was very late in the year to begin constructing forts, but Carrington's march had been slowed by having to transport a large mechanical "grass-cutting machine.

[citation needed] On July 16, a group of Cheyenne, including Dull Knife and Two Moons, visited Carrington at Fort Reno and proclaimed their desire for peace.

[51] On July 20, Red Cloud's warriors attacked a wagon train of 37 soldiers and civilians, killing two, at Crazy Woman Fork of the Powder River.

In the weeks and months that followed, the Indians repeatedly attacked the wagon trains that sallied out of Fort Kearny to cut construction timber in a forest six miles away.

[53] Fifteen Indian attacks near Fort Kearny between July 16 and September 27 resulted in the deaths of 6 soldiers and 28 civilians and the loss of several hundred horses, mules, and cattle.

[56] Captain Frederick Brown, until recently the post quartermaster and another of Carrington's critics, and two civilians, James Wheatley and Isaac Fisher, joined Fetterman, bringing the relief force up to 81 officers and men.

[56] Within a few minutes of their departure, a Lakota decoy party including Oglala warrior Crazy Horse appeared on Lodge Trail Ridge.

Although army forces had been augmented along the Bozeman Trail and at Fort Laramie in the wake of the Fetterman disaster, resources were still insufficient to take the offensive against the Indians.

Peace negotiations conducted by the friendly Lakota chieftain Spotted Tail with Red Cloud initially seemed promising, but proved to be only a delaying tactic by the Indians.

The heavy wooden boxes of 14 wagons had been placed on the ground in an oval corral near the main cutting site, and most of the soldiers and civilians took refuge there when hundreds of mounted Indian warriors suddenly appeared.

[68] The outcomes of the Hayfield and Wagon Box fights discouraged the Indians from mounting additional large-scale attacks, but they continued harassment of the forts along the Bozeman Trail, killing soldiers and civilians.

[69] On August 7 the Indians attacked a Union Pacific Railroad train at Plum Creek near present-day Lexington, Nebraska, far from the Powder River Country and in a region considered by the US to be peaceful until then.

These far, southern hunting grounds along the forks of Republican River remained holdings of the United States, as they had been since 1833, when the Pawnee Indians sold this area and other parts of their country to the whites.

The ceded area included the western Powder River hunting grounds of the Crow, already for years taken in possession by the Lakotas and their allies without consent.

[80] While using their new treaty right to hunt along the Republican River in United States' territory in the summer of 1873, two big Lakota camps made a large-scale attack on a travelling group of Pawnees in what has ever since been called the Massacre Canyon.

Seeing that the numbers of new emigrants and technology of the United States would overwhelm the Sioux, Red Cloud adapted to fighting the US Indian Bureau for fair treatment for his people.