Chief Red Cloud-Native American Indian Mask Sculpture

Agate slab, abalone, bone, red coral, Mexican Indian obsidian scraper


Red Cloud, the Oglala Sioux chief, was born at Pine Ridge, South Dakota. On the day of his birth, September 20th, 1822, a red meteor flashed across the sky, which some say prompted his name. After the end of the Civil War, Red Cloud, aged 44, had earned his chieftaincy on the strength of numerous honors won in battle. Red Cloud bitterly opposed the Bozeman Trail, which cut through the Sioux’s Powder River hunting grounds and across treaty protected lands enabling miners to take a shortcut from the North Plateau in Wyoming to the Gold Fields of Montana.

Red Cloud used Crazy Horse for his genius military strategy to
consistently outmaneuver the U.S. Cavalry. Their greatest victory came on December 21st, 1866 against General William J. Fetterman, who once boasted that with 80 men, he could ride through the Sioux Nation.

Staging a slam, hit and run attack on Fort Phil Kearney in Wyoming Territory, they lured Fetterman and his troops out of the safety of the Fort and into a perfectly set ambush that left Fetterman and all 80 of his cavalrymen dead. In the face of this unexpected and fierce resistance, the U.S. government reversed its position and offered to meet Red Cloud to discuss withdrawal from the bloody Bozeman Trail.

When the white man wants to raise wheat, he plants wheat. When he wants to raise corn, he plants corn. But when he wants to raise good Indians and he plants bad white men among us, who plant bad seed.
We are on the mountains, looking down on the soldiers and the forts. When we see the soldiers moving away and the forts abandoned, then I will come down to talk.
-Red Cloud

With the immediate aim of ending Red Cloud’s hostilities, the government agreed to abandon its military garrisons along the Bozeman Trail—effectively shutting down the route to white traffic. As humiliated officers and their men filed out of Fort Kearney, a triumphant Red Cloud rode through its gates and proceeded to burn it to the ground.