Red Cloud

Red Cloud, Mahpiya Luta in Lakota, led the Oglala Lakota from 1865 to 1909. In the war that carries his name, from 1866 to 1868, he forced the United States Army to abandon its forts along the road through Lakota hunting grounds. The Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868 then set out the Great Sioux Reservation, and it included the Black Hills.

Within a few years gold was found in the Black Hills and the treaty was broken; he spent the rest of his life leading his people through reservation life and traveling to Washington to demand that treaties be kept. Mount Rushmore is carved into those same hills. On our walk, the guide at the Grand View Terrace tells a detail few visitors know: the historian who first dreamed up a carving here imagined western figures, Red Cloud among them, before Gutzon Borglum chose four presidents instead.