The Bonanza or Bozeman Trail

What the victory bought was written at Fort Laramie in 1868. The treaty closed the road and set apart the Great Sioux Reservation, Black Hills included, for the Sioux nation's undisturbed use, with hunting rights in unceded country beyond. Red Cloud signed on November 6, after the forts were given up. Within a decade gold drew miners into the Black Hills, and an act of Congress in 1877 took them. In 1980 the Supreme Court held the taking unlawful; the Sioux have refused the award, now over a billion dollars, and ask for the land.

What the plaque says

The Bonanza or Bozeman Trail In the early 1860s there wasn't a ranch in this country from Bismarck to Bozeman and from the Platte River to Canada. To non-Indians it was land considered "fit only to raise Indians" and while some of them were hoping for a crop failure, the majority were indifferent. They didn't care how much the tribes fought amongst themselves. They were like the old-timer whose wife was battling a grizzly bear. He said he never had seen a fight where he took so little interest in the outcome. Then greed asserted itself and John Bozeman blazed a shortcut in 1863 from the Oregon Trail in Wyoming to the gold diggin's of southwestern Montana. The Bonanza or Bozeman Trail passed through the last great Indian hunting grounds on the northern Great Plains. The trail forded the Yellowstone River near here, coming from the southeast. It was a trail soaked with the blood of warriors, soldiers, and immigrants. Thousands of Lakota warriors, primarily under Red Cloud's leadership, bolstered by hundreds of Northern Cheyennes and some Arapahos, fought against the trail for five years and forced its closure by the military in 1868, a rare victory of tribes over the US Government.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Crazy Mountains — 20 mi
  Awaxaawippíia, the Apsáalooke's holiest mountains, where young Plenty Coups saw the end of the buffalo.

More markers nearby

• The Crazy Mountains — 12 mi
• The Bozeman Trail — 12 mi
• The Great Highway of the Northwest: The Yellowstone Trail — 12 mi
• The Cattle Drive of 1866 — 12 mi