Conflict and Tension 1862–1876

Between the outbreak of Little Crow's War in 1862 and the Lakota victory at the Little Bighorn in 1876, armed conflict between the United States and the Plains Indian nations moved from episodic frontier skirmishes to a coordinated military campaign. This is the period Edexcel refers to as the Indian Wars of the Plains, and it is one of the most heavily examined topics on Paper 2 Section A. Q3 "importance" questions frequently ask you to weigh the relative significance of events such as the Sand Creek Massacre, the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. This lesson gives you the events and the analytical links that let you answer such questions at Grade 6 and above.

Setting the Scene: Why 1862?

You saw in Lesson 4 that 1862 was the year of the Homestead Act and the Pacific Railroad Act. It is also the year in which federal authority was most distracted by the US Civil War (1861–65), in which Union troops were mostly deployed in the east. Two things followed.

• Volunteer militias, rather than regular Army units, were often the frontline force on the Plains.
• Federal promises to Plains nations — including annuity payments under Fort Laramie 1851 — went unpaid or arrived late as the US Treasury prioritised war spending.

Both factors made 1862 the year tension on the Plains finally broke into sustained war.

Little Crow's War (Dakota War) 1862

In August 1862, starving bands of Dakota Sioux (the eastern cousins of the Lakota) in Minnesota — promised but never paid their federal annuities — rose up under Chief Little Crow. Over five weeks, Dakota warriors killed around 500 settlers and soldiers in a series of raids across south-western Minnesota before being defeated by Minnesota militia at the Battle of Wood Lake in September.

The consequences were severe.

• 303 Dakota men were sentenced to death by military tribunal. Lincoln commuted most sentences but 38 were hanged at Mankato on 26 December 1862 — the largest mass execution in US history.
• The remaining Dakota were expelled from Minnesota entirely.
• The uprising panicked settlers across the Plains and led to increased militia activity in Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska in 1863–64.

For the exam, Little Crow's War matters because it set the pattern — broken treaty obligations leading to Indigenous uprising leading to harsh federal retaliation — that would be repeated across the 1860s.

The Sand Creek Massacre 1864

On 29 November 1864, a column of Colorado militia under Colonel John Chivington attacked a camp of Cheyenne and Arapaho under Chief Black Kettle at Sand Creek in eastern Colorado. The camp was peaceful; Black Kettle had just recently met US officers at Denver and had been told to camp at Sand Creek under the protection of Fort Lyon. He was flying both a US flag and a white flag over his tipi when the attack began. Around 150 Cheyenne and Arapaho — mostly women, children and the elderly — were killed.

Sand Creek is labelled a massacre by Edexcel and by modern historians because it was an attack on a camp known to be at peace, deliberately targeting non-combatants. It was later condemned even by a US Congressional inquiry in 1865, which called Chivington's action "a cowardly and cold-blooded slaughter".

Consequences

• Cheyenne and Arapaho withdrawal from any remaining faith in peaceful coexistence. Surviving warriors joined the Lakota in raids across the Plains over 1865–66.
• Political reputation damage for the US Army, making peace-faction policies briefly more influential in Washington.
• Long-term moral reframing: Sand Creek became, in later decades, a touchstone reference for critics of US Indian policy.

Sand Creek is one of the events you are most likely to see on Q3 "importance" questions. Your argument about its importance should frame it analytically: Sand Creek is important not just because of what happened on one day but because it destroyed the last serious chance for peaceful settlement between the US and central Plains nations.

Red Cloud's War 1866–68

In 1866 the US Army began building forts along the Bozeman Trail, a shortcut from the Oregon Trail north into the Montana goldfields, running through prime Lakota hunting country in Wyoming and Montana. The Oglala Lakota chief Red Cloud led a sustained military campaign against the forts.

Red Cloud's strategy was disciplined. Rather than large pitched battles, he hit supply wagons, cut off wood-gathering parties, and gradually starved the forts of timber, food and communication. The most famous action was the Fetterman Fight on 21 December 1866, in which a column of 81 US soldiers under Captain William Fetterman was lured into an ambush and wiped out. Fetterman had boasted that with 80 men he could "ride through the whole Sioux nation"; 80 men was exactly the number that died.

Red Cloud's War is remarkable because the Lakota won. By 1868 the US government concluded it could not sustain the forts on the Bozeman Trail without massive reinforcements, and agreed to abandon them.

The Fort Laramie Treaty 1868

The peace settlement was the Fort Laramie Treaty 1868. Its key provisions were: