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 CHAPTER XXIII THE RED CLOUD WAR

1865, about the time that the War of the Outbreak ended, the government undertook to build a highway

from the California trail, in the vicinity of Fort Laramie, across by way of the Powder River valley to the gold mines in Montana and Idaho. This road was necessarily run through the richest buffalo range left to the Sioux Indians. Red Cloud was then fast coming into prominence as the principal chief of the Oglala Sioux. The construction of the road was intrusted to Colonel Sawyer, and he began work with a party of surveyors and an escort of only twenty-five men, from Company B of the Dakota Cavalry. Red Cloud met 134