An agreement made by the United States with several bands of Sioux (the Brulés, Oglalas, Miniconjous, Yanktonais, Hunkpapas, Blackfeet, Cutheads, Two Kettles, Sans Arcs, and Santees) and Arapahos, the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie brought temporary peace to the northern plains following "Red Cloud's War" of 1866-68.
Fighting had broken out along the Bozeman Trail in 1866. The Bozeman carried gold seekers from the Oregon Trail in southern Oregon to the mines near the Continental Divide. Teton Sioux bands under Red Cloud and Crazy Horse claimed to control the Bighorn region and pledged to drive out anyone who challenged them. In 1866 the U.S. Army erected several forts to defend the trail, but these were quickly surrounded by well-armed warriors. In December of that year at one such garrison, Fort Phil Kearny, near modern-day Sheridan, Wyoming, a war party under Crazy Horse wiped out a detachment of eighty soldiers who had ridden out to pursue them. In the ensuing panic Congress established a Peace Commission to negotiate a settlement with the region's tribes.
Set up in July 1867, the commission was led by the Civil War hero William Tecumseh Sherman and populated with politicians and Christian reformers such as John T. Sanborn and Samuel F. Tappan. It invited friendly Indian leaders to assemble at Fort Laramie, in southeastern Wyoming, in spring 1868. A single session had been envisioned, but by the end of the year three separate treaty negotiations had taken place. In April and May, Spotted Tail of the Brulés and American Horse of the Oglalas came to Fort Laramie and signed the agreement, but other Sioux leaders stayed away. In July the commission met with Hunkpapa, Blackfoot, Two Kettle, Sans Arc, and Miniconjou leaders aboard the steamboat Agnes on the Missouri River. The spring agreement was approved by these chiefs and a new provision was added: the government would abandon its Bozeman Trail posts. The order to disband the forts was given in September. Finally, on November 6, Red Cloud and his followers appeared at Fort Laramie and added their consent to the document. Congress ratified the treaty on February 16, 1869.
The 1868 treaty had four parts. The first pledged both sides to peace. The second reserved the area west of the Missouri River and east of the Rockies for the "absolute and undisturbed use" of the Sioux. The third and longest section described several mechanisms by which the government would support the tribes: it would establish schools, provide seed and clothing for Indian farmers, and set up agencies for the distribution of aid. The treaty further stipulated that no revisions would be made in the agreement without the approval of three-quarters of the adult males of the tribe. Finally, the treaty recognized the Bozeman Trail area as "unceded Indian territory" where whites would not be allowed to settle and within which there would be no military posts.
Because the 1868 Fort Laramie treaty tacitly recognized Sioux power in the Bighorn region, it was viewed by war leaders like Red Cloud as a ratification of their victory over the United States. At the same time, the agreement's extensive provisions for government assistance to those who settled on the new Sioux reservation and took up farming satisfied government officials that the Sioux would soon be "pacified." These divergent views underlay conflicts between the Sioux and the United States until the Battle of the Little Bighorn eight years later. A much longer dispute would surround the treaty's "three-fourths rule" regarding future changes. Congressional leaders would insist that the government was not perpetually bound by it, whereas tribal officials would argue for decades to come that this provision was a continual mark of tribal sovereignty and an ongoing bar to federal power over the tribes.
