Fort Robinson-Camp Sheridan-Pine Ridge Indian Agency Road

Crazy Horse, Tȟašúŋke Witkó, rode this road on September 5, 1877, on a promise. Lt. Jesse M. Lee agreed to take him back to Camp Robinson and said he would have a chance to tell his side of the story, and Touch the Clouds came along with some three hundred armed men. The hearing never came. Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper of October 13, 1877, printed a sketch of his funeral procession passing through Camp Sheridan. When the agencies moved that fall, his family carried his remains away by travois and buried him in a place never disclosed.

What the plaque says

Fort Robinson-Camp Sheridan- Pine Ridge Indian Agency Road Following the 1874 establishment of military posts near the Red Cloud and Spotted Tail agencies for the Oglala and Brule Sioux, the army laid out a forty-two-mile road to transport military and Indian supplies between the agencies and posts. Oglala leader Crazy Horse traveled the road on his final journey, when an army officer and Indian scouts escorted him from Camp Sheridan to Camp (later Fort) Robinson on September 5, 1877. Crazy Horse was killed that night while resisting imprisonment and his father returned his body to Camp Sheridan the next day. After Red Cloud Agency was relocated to Dakota Territory in 1878 and renamed Pine Ridge Agency, the road was extended there. By 1881 a telegraph line paralleled the road. With the coming of settlers in the late 1870s, civilian stagecoaches and wagons traveled the road. The government continued to use it to deliver Indian agency supplies into the 1880s. Completion of the Fremont, Elkhorn, and Missouri Valley Railroad through northwestern Nebraska in 1885-86 relegated the road to local use. Dawes County Historical Society Nebraska State Historical Society Nebraska Department of Roads Transportation Enhancement Program, 2009

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Museum of the Fur Trade — 4.6 mi
  A museum of what traders and Native nations exchanged, from the oldest known point blanket to a Lakota leader's silver cross, beside the rebuilt Bordeaux trading post east of Chadron.
• Fort Robinson State Park — 25 mi
  The army post beside the Red Cloud Agency where Crazy Horse was bayoneted in 1877 and Morning Star's Northern Cheyenne broke out into the January cold of 1879.
• The Heritage Center at Red Cloud — 28 mi
  A free gallery of Lakota art on the campus of the old Holy Rosary Mission, where Red Cloud asked for a school and is buried on the hill above it.

More markers nearby

• Chadron State College — 1.0 mi
• The First Church in Chadron — 1.3 mi
• The Chadron-Chicago Cowboy Race — 1.5 mi
• The Fort Pierre-Fort Laramie Trail — 2.9 mi