Red Cloud
Mahpiya Luta was an Oglala Lakota warrior who fought in Red Cloud’s War and then tried unsuccessfully to prevent the Great Sioux War in the mid and late nineteenth century. He was an ally of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse and an important member of the Lakota sect of the Sioux nation. As a military leader he frustrated the United States Army troops sent against him, and he inflicted upon the US Army the worst defeat it would suffer in the Plains Wars at a battle known as the Fetterman Fight, until it was surpassed by the Custer debacle at Little Big Horn.
After his military activities were behind him Red Cloud proved to be an important ally to the United States while transitioning the Lakota people to life on a reservation. Red Cloud led a group of Lakota to Washington DC before the campaign in which Custer was killed in an attempt to prevent miners from continuing to intrude on the sacred lands (to the Sioux) of the Black Hills. Although unsuccessful in his attempts to find peace due to what he saw as American government intransigence, he did not take part in the ensuing war.
During Red Cloud’s War he led his followers into battle in December 1866. An American detachment of troops accompanied by two civilians were lured by Red Cloud’s ally and protégé, Crazy Horse, to disobey orders and pursue what the Americans believed to be a band of raiders. Crazy Horse led the Americans into a trap set and sprung by Red Cloud, and the entire American command was wiped out. Americans called it the Fetterman Massacre. More than 2,000 Indians participated in the brief engagement, which caused outrage among the American population and led to peace talks with the Arapaho, Sioux, and Cheyenne.
The peace talks led to the Treaty of Fort Laramie, which created the Great Sioux Reservation covering parts of Nebraska and the Dakota Territory in what would become South Dakota in 1868. In 1870 Red Cloud made his first visit to Washington, meeting with President U.S. Grant and the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. This visit, in which Red Cloud frankly presented the needs of the Sioux on the reservation resulted in the creation of the Red Cloud Agency, to distribute goods and other necessities, and Red Cloud took led his followers there, near the Platte River below Fort Laramie.
Many of the Lakota fled the reservation during the Great Sioux War, to join Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull in their campaign against the United States, which while initially successful against Custer ultimately failed. Red Cloud continued to oppose measures by the government which he deemed to be too much of a change for his people and their way of life, such as the breakup of communal land into privately held parcels, and he lobbied for better care and better quality supplies for the Lakota. He died in 1909, having outlived nearly all of the participants of the Plains Wars.